Good Housekeeping and Making Better Use of Investment

There are a number of features of many existing record-creating electronic systems which offer some records management advantages. Most users operate in two or three distinct areas. Work PCs are normally linked in a group workspace, which may in turn overlap or be linked to a corporate workspace.

In practice this means that many staff are already used to the idea of working in a common space whose files have to be labelled in such a way that all can find them easily. The levels of permitted access are controlled either by a local system administrator, or in the corporate space by the central IT management.

This gives the opportunity for rule-based records management, and a degree of central control. The key to success is staff training.

The policies need to cover

• An agreed File Plan for shared file areas. In an ideal records management system this would be based on function, the creation of new folders would be strictly controlled, and file naming conventions would be agreed.

• MS Office documents.

  • The document properties box can be used to improve metadata

  • Documents can be 'declared' as records by using the 'read only' tag

  • Standard templates can be used to improve form design

• Version control of documents.

  We have an example of how an MIS project team applied records management to its file storage.

• The selection of new record-creating systems, for example finance or web content management systems, should include

  • functionality for records preservation

  • the generic specification for answering FOI, Data Protection and Environmental Information queries. The Department of Constitutional Affairs has included a specification on the Directgov Website

  E-Mails

  The control and management of emails is a very large and controversial subject which cannot be pursued in this infoKit. It is however important to remember that it is the information content of the e-mail which is important and may need to be retained rather than the fact that it has arrived as an e-mail.

  There are however a number of key issues here, which need to be incorporated into any institutional E-mail Policy, such as:

  • Who owns e-mails, the institution or the recipient, or is ownership shared according to content?

  • Where does responsibility lie for capturing e-mails, the recipient or the institution?

  • Should all e-mails be eliminated automatically at x weeks unless they have been specifically saved to agreed files?

  E-mail policy is perhaps the most tricky area that all institutions will need to sort out under the new Freedom of Information and Data Protection regimes. Most will have some guidelines in place but very few have tackled the issue head-on. For most institutions it is the area where personal and business considerations overlap in a very untidy way and the sheer volume of traffic seems to make central intervention both cumbersome and an infringement of staff autonomy. There has been one JISC study of this matter - Institutional Records Management and E-mail. The important thing to remember is that e-mails are available for Freedom of Information searches irrespective of the wishes or opinion of the creator.

  There are a number of choices that have to be made when building an e-mail Policy:

  Ownership

  • All e-mail messages belong to the institution

  • Only business messages are owned by the institution

  • Personal messages are owned jointly by the institution and recipient or writer

  • Personal messages are confidential

  Permitting e-Mail Use

  • E-Mail may be used only for the institution's business

  • May be used for incidental personal purposes

  • May be used for all purposes without restriction

  Labelling

  • All personal messages must be labelled as such

  • Messages must disclose the limits of the employee's authority

  • Personal messages must carry a specified disclaimer

  Monitoring

  • E-mail may be monitored for any business purpose without notice or consent. (This is unlikely to be permissible under Human Rights legislation)

  • Monitoring permitted with good cause or legal obligation

  • Agreed procedures for monitoring

  • No monitoring

  Contents Disclosure

  • Message contents may be disclosed for any business purpose without consent

  • Disclosure as required by law

  • Agreed procedures for disclosure

  • No disclosure

  Substantive Rules

  • System may not be used for illegal or wrongful purposes

  • System may not download software without technical approval and vetting

  • System may not be used for electronic snooping.

You can view Northumbria University's e-mail use policy and good practice guide.