We can rebuild it
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Presentation on Records Management for 2016 Midwest Archives Conference, "RM 2.0" session, April 30, 2016.
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We can rebuild it
- 1. We Can Rebuild It: Revamping Records Management through a consortial model Brad Houston University Records Archivist, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
- 2. Wisconsin Public Records Law: The Short(ish) version • Wis. Stat. 16.61: Records are the property of WI , so manage them! • Mandated records program/position at all state agencies (Good!) • Definition of record (Good!) • Archives as repository (Mostly Good!) • No destruction of records without Public Records Board approval (OK…) • Records Retention and Disposition Authorities (RRDAs) • No enforcement mechanism (Bad!) Source: kcmusicshop.blogspot.com
- 3. “Records Management: A Program Barely Alive…” • Over 400 office-specific schedules, many duplicative • No central point of reference for retention/disposition • An (extremely!) outdated Records Management binder • Distributed physically c. 1993 • No indication of 10 year sunset period Source; http://article.wn.com/view/2012/04/05/you r_next_box_set_the_six_million_dollar_ man
- 4. “I can’t hold it, she’s breaking up!” The “specific schedule” model flawed for UWM in a number of ways: • Over 200 offices/departments/units with records to manage • Non-cooperation = records don’t get RRDAs created • “I’m too busy to worry about records management…” • Unclear/shifting organizational structure • “Does this division-wide schedule still apply to my office?” • Huge amount of records schedule upkeep • Review/Renew/Supersede every 10 years—rolling basis • 3 month turnaround time with Wisconsin Public Records Board • …which often leads to non-compliance with records law
- 5. UW Records Officers Council • Mandated (sort of) by Wisconsin Public Records Law • Lots of overlap with UW System Archivists Council (UWSAC) • Opportunities to weigh in on historical records! • Links to UW System General Counsel, Public Records Custodians • Primary Goal: General Schedules for UW schools and colleges • Secondary Goal: Reponses to records issues affecting UW (e.g. EO 159, Sunshine Week 2016) • Secondary Goal: Providing resources for records management reference and training
- 6. “The World’s First Bionic Schedule”— The Power of Big Buckets • Schedule similar/identical series ONCE across many offices • Easier to disseminate passively (websites, etc.) • …harder to disseminate actively • Larger scope Approval at executive level Greater Buy-in • Easy-to-describe collection policy for institutional records Source: TVAcres.com
- 7. “We can make it Better than it was” • Some functional areas used by almost every campus unit: • Fiscal and Accounting (including budgeting) • Personnel and Payroll • Student Academic and Advising • Specialized, but broad, areas on every UW campus: • Financial Aid • Health Center • Residence Life • Research Result: huge increase in both records scheduled and units covered (~80%!)
- 8. “Stronger”, Part 1: Internal vetting Example: Administrative Records • Started with state-level framework • Adjusted based on knowledge of records actually created on campus • Submitted to UWROC members for review • Series additions • Retention/disposition adjustments Example: Personnel Records • UWROC “alumna” on central HR system implementation team • Identified records in system and management/disposition needs • Submitted to UWROC members for review • Records in on-campus systems • Retention/disposition for archival records in particular
- 9. “Stronger”, Part 2: Distributed SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) • Identify series of general interest UWROC missed • Identify local series more appropriately handled with specific schedules • Greater knowledge of statutory/admin requirements for records • Adjustments to retention/disposition times • Flagging records series that should be confidential/contain PII • Presentations to campus-wide groups? (UW CIOs, UW HR directors, etc.) “Many Hands Make Light Work”
- 10. “Faster”? Sometimes… • Construction and review of these schedules takes time • Reviews by UWROC at monthly meetings • SMEs’ higher level = reviewing schedules not always a priority • Still on Public Records Board quarterly review… • Usually about a year start-to-finish • Still ultimately faster than individual office scheduling Source: usgamer.net
- 11. “Faster”, Part II: Face-to-Face Work
- 12. “We Have The Technology”: Advocacy/Outreach • Passive Outreach: UWROC website and individual campus records sites • Web presence necessary but not sufficient • Active Outreach: Web training modules and strategic planning for campus training • Advocacy: the benefits of the General Counsel connection…
- 13. The consortium model can work for you • Use your natural institutional associations • Find partners in the same records management context: • Size of institution • Type of institution • Laws/Regulations to which you are subject (usually by state or by industry) • Check each other’s records work! • Same approval authority: go in on the same schedule • Different approval authorities: frame as “best practices” across the industry Source: theincrediblystrangemovie.blog spot.com
- 14. Issues to watch out for • “Special Snowflake” units • Series unique to one office/institution • Local differences in Records Law or regulatory practices • Changes in subject-area practice that necessitate change in retention/disposition • E.g. NSF Data Management Plan requirement! Source: emsoutdoors.com
- 15. Thank You! Brad Houston, University Records Archivist, UW-Milwaukee houstobn@uwm.edu Twitter: @herodotusjr This presentation available online at http://www.slideshare.net/herodotusjr/we-can- rebuild-it-61095663 “The Six Million Dollar Man” is copyright Martin Caidin and Harve Bennett Productions, in association with Universal City Studios
Editor's Notes
- Hello! My name is Brad Houston, and I am the University Records Archivist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I’m going to talk to you today about how my experience with the UW-System’s records management confab, UWROC, helped me revitalize the scope and reach of the records management program at UWM, and how you might be able to take some of what we’ve done and apply it to your own institution’s records needs. Along the way, you might notice a *few* references to a certain 1970s science fiction show…
- So, before I get into the meat of the presentation, a bit of background on the Wisconsin Public Records Law, which governs a lot of what I do on campus. In a lot of ways, I’m lucky to have a legal mandate for records management, since my position and program are in some form required by law to exist on campus. The law also defines what is meant by “record”, which is another clause that has helped people destroy hundreds of thousands of convenience copies or personal scribbles. As an archivist I also appreciate the specification of the State Historical Society or the UW Archives as the official records repository, though that can have some unintended consequences which we’ll discuss later. We start to get into dodgy territory when all records are mandated to be destroyed *only* with approval by the Public Records Board, but the law also allows for Records Retention and Disposition Authorities to create proxy permission via records schedules, so that’s OK. The BIG problem is that there’s no enforcement mechanism in the law– no consequences if you don’t follow it, outside of the risk of litigation– so getting people to actually participate in records management can be challenging.
- The campus records program was in a bit of a state when I arrived at UWM in 2007. The biggest issue came with the biggest figure: 400, which is the approximate number of record schedules being maintained on campus. This number covered a lot fewer offices than you’d expect, because a lot of them were duplicative schedules—two series for director’s correspondence for two research centers– so there were some pretty big holes in coverage. To make matters worse, a predecessor in my position had created an infamous crimson binder and distributed it to all offices, including some examples of schedules. This led many offices to assume their records problems were fixed forever. The problem was that many, if not most, of the schedules had, by the time I arrived, gone through at least two renewal cycles without being renewed, so lots of the advice in that binder was just plain wrong. Not a good place for a program to be, though possibly not as bad as the slide title suggests.
- Ultimately, the reason the “specific schedule” model is not a good for UWM, or most other decentralized institutions, is that it’s extremely hard to maintain. You’re essentially cycling through 200+ offices and making sure each and every one of them has each and ever series scheduled, which takes time for you. More to the point, it takes time for THEM to meet with you and talk records management, and so when an office decides that you aren’t important enough to devote time to, you now have a hole in your schedule coverage. Moreover, it’s a university– so offices are constantly changing names, divisions, leaders, etc. MOST of the time schedules will follow records to their new offices, but in the case of radical changes you might have to rewrite them for clarity. Which takes us to problem 4: Because of that added administrative layer to get the schedules approved by the public records board, you sometimes have as much as 6 month delay between writing a schedule and having it approved– and meanwhile your offices are getting impatient and deciding to just keep everything, or worse, shred everything.
- Enter the hero of our story, the UW Records Officers Council, hereafter referred to as UWROC. It’s an informal committee, so the body itself is not mandated by state law, but it was brought together because each campus needs a records officer, and it made sense to confer on issues affecting all campuses. Until recently, this group was largely an offshoot of the UW System Archivists Council, and there’s still some overlap there, but having a separate records officers group gives us the opportunity to work with those members of our cohort who aren’t necessarily in the archives. We’ve got a few librarians and acting library directors, some folks from counsel’s office, at least one “pure” records manager, and some folks who also answer open records requests, which in Wisconsin is called the Public Records Custodian. Now, primarily what this group has been doing since I’ve been here has been creating general records schedules to affect all UW schools and colleges, but we’ve also taken an increasingly large outreach role, both in considering campus and system responses to issues like the University of Oregon email issue from last year, and in providing resources for end users. I’m going to focus on #1, but we’ll talk about all three.
- So, you may have also heard “General Schedule” called the “Big Bucket” approach to scheduling, but either way the primary benefit is that it takes a lot of records with similar functionality and retention times and groups them together, reducing the total number of schedules to be worried about. Having a few “master” schedules makes it easier to post them on a chart online, for example, or to provide examples of retention periods during on-campus workshops. The other bonus of using general schedules, particularly at the level of the entire UW System, is that you almost always have to get high-level approval for them– at UWM the Vice Chancellor for Administrative Affairs signs off, for example– and you can then point to that approval as a reason for smaller units to adopt that schedule. For those of us who are also archivists, Big Buckets are also nice because they provide clear guidelines of the *type* of material that is archival and non-archival. So you can refuse or weed those requisition forms from your business office with a clear conscience!
- In general, our general schedule targets have included two broad categories of records functions, some of which might be applicable to your individual situations as well. Our most-frequently cited schedules come from functions that are performed, in some way or another, by every campus unit– things like fiscal and accounting records, student academic and advising, and payroll. I get questions all the time about how long to keep leave reports, and because of our payroll schedule, I am able to give a quick and easy answer. The other big category of general schedule we work with is for functional areas like student financial aid, residence life, or research– possibly not every department has these records, but every campus does, and by combining our efforts we can save ourselves duplication at a system-wide level. The result of this effort has been an enormous uptick in the level of records compliance and coverage– I estimate about 80-85 percent of records held by most offices are covered by one general schedule or another. It’s much more likely someone will follow a records schedule if you can already say “Here’s what to do” vs. “Wait 3 months while I write one for you.”
- Beyond increasing coverage, a great advantage of the consortial approach is that instead of the resources of one records manager at your disposal, you have the resources of every member of your group to draw from. If you’re lucky, some or all of them will be smarter than you and will be able to find your mistakes and correct your oversights. Two quick examples of how this can go: the first one, for administrative records, was a matter of adjusting an existing state schedule for campus use– but because UW is so different from lots of other state agencies, we made changes to almost every series, based on pooling our knowledge of admin records on each campus. For the second example, we were able to convince the team implementing UW’s new HR system to embed a former UWROC member on the implementation team, which allowed her both to make suggestions to the team and give us fair warning of records series that we needed to tackle in the new system. In both cases, having UWROC consult on and vet schedules for completeness, compliance with laws, etc. helped us better prepare for the next step.
- That step being, of course, consulting with our local Subject Matter Experts, who by definition are more familiar with their activities than we are. This is something you need to do when developing general schedules ANYWAY, but by doing it in a system context, we were able to identify which parts of the schedule worked for everyone, which we needed to make more “generic” to cover more types of forms and documents, and which we needed to allow people to opt out of for their particular circumstances. In addition, these experts are usually also experts in the laws that apply to their particular field, and so help make sure that we’ve correctly identified areas where information should be confidential. And, of course, lots of these people have system-wide meetings, too– so if we can present our IT schedule to the CIO council collectively, that potentially saves us lots of time talking to each individually.
- On the question of saving time, that takes me to the big drawback of the consortial approach: Because you’ve got more people to get feedback from, the SPEED of that feedback is going to be greatly reduced. UWROC only meets via teleconference once a month, which limits our real-time collaboration somewhat. The fact that we are acting as a system does not, moreover, actually solve the “I’m too busy for records management” problem. If we need to get the feedback of the police chiefs about what records they’re even maintaining, if cooperation is not forthcoming it can set back progress on these schedules for months. Plus, of course, there is still the matter of getting the schedule through the state review process… Having said all that, when you look at the collective time it would take to schedule these records as general schedules even at the individual campus level, much less the office level, general scheduling is ultimately much faster. It just doesn’t always SEEM like it.
- One way we’ve tried to speed up some of our work product recently has been to use some of UWROC’s annual meeting to “workshop” schedules. By this, I mean that we have focused on identifying series that need to be added, changed, or removed, bringing relevant information to meetings to inform any changes, taking and visualizing notes of discussion (as seen on this slide), and coming away from the session with a sense of our next steps and contact opportunities. I don’t claim that this is a particularly new method of collaboration– anyone with familiarity with agile programming could tell you otherwise– but it’s new to us, and provides a way to actively shape schedules in a way that is much, much more difficult over email or phone. I anticipate future annual meetings featuring a lot more of these types of sessions, which should increase the speed with which our schedules are completed and sent for approval.
- Last, but not least, UWROC has consistently been working on not just creating the record schedules, but making them available and accessible to the employeesof our various campuses. Despite what the slide title says, the main “technology” here is “good communication” more than anything. As mentioned, we post all of our general schedules to UWROC’s website on the System Administration page, but as an outreach solution this is really a bare minimum. More actively, as members of the group develop training around the various records schedules, we are always in contact with each other to share our training materials for adaptation on other campuses. Most recently, I created a 7-minute web training module on our new Research records schedule, but intentionally kept my language campus-neutral so other campuses could avoid reinventing the wheel. As far as advocacy goes, I mentioned before that our coordinator is on UW General Counsel staff; this positioning has proven to be extremely useful in allowing UWROC to bend the ear of administrators about new schedules and the need to follow and promote them, particularly when the rest of us are a few layers down in our respective libraries.
- Now, two questions present themselves here. One, “Brad, my system doesn’t have a group like this”, and two, “Brad, I don’t belong to a system like this.” Both have the same solution: Start your own! Talk to whoever your records management sponsor is about the usefulness of collaborating with related institutions, while at the same time making overtures to said institutions. You may find less resistance if you try to use a natural association, such as a state conference, as framework, but really any institutions will help. That said, they will help the MOST if you and the other institutions are approximately the same size, the same type of institution, and are subject to the same records laws in your state or industry. That way, you’ll have similar questions and can work on the answers together. Everyone loves “best practices”, right? Think of a do-it-yourself consortium as formalizing a local best practices relationship.
- Now, as with all new initiatives, there are challenges that you’ll have to address, the most common of which being those offices who, for whatever reason, don’t fit into your general schedule. Maybe they have a different administrative need, or their accrediting agency requires them to keep records for longer. This won’t SCUTTLE your general schedules plan, but it will require you to be aware of these offices and the specific schedules they will need. (It probably doesn’t need saying, but : DON’T call them “special snowflakes” to their faces…) Beyond that, you should be aware of where the similarity in records context with your new consortium begins and ends– how are your local laws different? Does your school, as an R1, have different retention needs than a non-Carnegie school? And, of course, these laws and requirements are subject to change without notice, so you should be sure that someone in your group– it might be you!– is on the lookout for changes and can think about the implications on those schedules the group just wrote.
- In my 8 years on UWROC, I’ve found it invaluable to the redevelopment of UWM’s records management program, both as a newbie records manager finding my way, and eventually as a semi-seasoned professional who still needs some spot checking. I’m very fortunate that the members of UWROC past and present, some of whom are in this room, have been amazing resources for filling gaps and addressing UW records issues. For those of you who choose to take this approach, I hope that you will find a group as talented and thoughtful as this one is. Thank you.