LIS 5473 Document and Records Management / Summer 2018

Instructor: Jan Davis

Objectives and Learning Outcomes

This course is designed to:

Provide an introduction to records management as a specialized business discipline.
Explain and outline the elements and benefits of a comprehensive records management plan.
Provide options and tools for conducting records inventories and developing records retention schedules.
Provide an overview of the nature of various record formats, including special considerations or advantages and disadvantages of each.
Guide students in presenting information in an appropriate manner for a variety of audience.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

Discuss the role of records and records management in organizations.
Develop an inventory plan to identify and describe records, including vital records, in an organization.
Prepare a records retention schedule for an organization, based on the content and purpose or value of the records.
Outline the characteristics of a well-designed records storage facilities, as well as identify key risk factors.
Describe issues and concerns related to organization, access, maintenance, and management of records in various formats.

My experience:

Document and records management was a very informative and helpful class for me. In this course, I learned what constitutes an electronic or physical record, and the concept of the life cycle of a record. Records are created, classified, used, retained, and possibly disposed of. The life cycle helps in identifying the active and inactive stages and this allows for focus on the accessibility of active files, and the retention of inactive files.

Through case studies that were introduced in class, I learned how records management practices have evolved over the years. For example, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 destroyed millions of records, and it was through the processes of recovery and disposal in this case, that better practices were realized in order to prevent future damage which was much more cost effective than to spend on recovery efforts. I found this fascinating and it reminded me too how archivists have many of the same practices in place to protect documents and records that are being kept as vital records; vital meaning they are the very core of an institution. Examples of this include transcript records from a college or land records in a town or city office.

With our assignments, I was able to learn about conducting inventories through surveys and interviews with key persons and visiting the physical storage or file rooms. Results help to ascertain what type of retention schedule should be in place to meet the needs and the available storage space for the place of business. My favorite assignment allowed for me to do just that. I had a hypothetical company that was adding a new building and they needed to decide on either a centralized filing room, separate file rooms for each department, or digitizing their records. I wrote the memo as a records management specialist introducing the options and advantages and disadvantages for each. I think this really encompasses all the elements of records management that was introduced in this class. I learned so much from this exercise!

Since Records management is the practice of understanding and controlling information that is created or received in an institution, along with the use and maintenance for the life of the record, I thought this course would complement the other classes in the archival concentration because if I were to be employed in a financial or business institution, archivists in these settings would have to have a strong grasp on records management, what it is, and gain the skills needed. What I liked the most is that the skills learned here are very similar to what was learned in collection development and archival preservation.