Background

Part of both pieces of FOI legislation require that institutions prepare a 'publication scheme', and again as a collaborative effort Model Publication schemes were prepared for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and a separate one for Scotland. Copies of both these documents may be found on the JISC Legal website.

So far as is known all post-16 educational institutions signed up to one or other of these rather than prepare a scheme from scratch. These schemes were taken as taken as the starting point for this exercise, because they represented a standard approach to the categorisation of records and provided an obvious outline framework for this project.

The third major contributor to this exercise was the Study of the Records Lifecycle prepared for JISC in 2002, which attempted to identify in Higher Education Institutions the sources of records creation and management according to functional principles, rather than departmental or organisational structures, and provide a set of retention periods appropriate to HEIs.

The Function Activity Model (FAM) and Record Retention Schedule (RRS) study was based on the principles of best international practice for records keeping now codified as ISO 15489.

The Document Management Specialists website also contains a list of recommended retention periods as they applied to institutions of Higher Education, and wherever appropriate this has bee retained. The Model Publication schemes for FE accepted the logic of functional organisation, and in one sense the present project represents a simplified version of the Lifecycle document.