April Records and Information Management Month
by Elizabeth T. Hansen ‘03, Director, University Records Manager
April is Records and Information Management Month. Just like warmer weather is a reminder to spring clean your house, Records and Information Management Month is a reminder to spring clean your physical hard copy and electronic records.
When we spring clean our homes, we look around and see what can be purged...clothing, broken furniture, clutter. We evaluate what we need and get rid of what we don’t. Most of us spend 8 hours a day in our office, or half of our waking hours. So, let’s give our office space the same consideration we give our home.
Tips for cleaning up Physical Records:
- Look through the piles on your desk, files in your filing cabinet that predate you, or boxes on the floor or in a closet.
- Purge documents that have met their retention requirements according to the University Records Retention Schedule.
- Shred any documents with personal or sensitive information. Recycle documents with no personal information.
- Store any documents that haven’t met their retention in the University Records Center.
Electronic records should be cleaned up as well. It is easy to overlook these records because they don’t take up physical and visible space in our office. However, according to University policy, electronic records are required to be managed according to the University Records Retention Schedule in the same way as hard copy records.
Tips for cleaning up electronic records:
Shared Drives/Teams Sites/SharePoint:
- Ensure that you only have access to sites/drives for your current position.
- Leave a Teams Channel if you no longer work on it.
OneDrive:
- Move anything your department needs for your job to the Shared Drive or SharePoint. OneDrive should only be used for your personal working documents. If you win the lottery tomorrow, you want anything that is needed to do your job in a shared space, so your hard work doesn’t get lost.
- Get rid of old “for your reference” documents you do not need anymore. For example, that presentation from a conference you attended 5 years ago and haven’t opened since or handbooks that you receive every year (only keep the most recent version).
- Get rid of old versions and drafts of final work products. There should not be “January2025Report-1” and “January2025Report-2” when there is a “FINAL-January2025Report.”
Email:
- Records should not be stored in email. Email goes away when you leave the University. Any records received by email should be saved to OneDrive or a Shared Drive.
- Clean out the email clutter. See our Email Deletion Workshop Video for exercises to clean up your email inbox.
- Use your personal email for personal emails. Remember, while we are not subject to Freedom of Information Laws, your email could be preserved as part of a Legal Hold or Audit. Think, do I want Counsel’s Office or my boss to read these emails?
“Clutter is postponed decisions.” - Barbara Hemphill
When it comes to records, Clutter often occurs because we don’t have the time (or want to take the time) to deal with it. Break it into small chunks and focus on one location at a time. By reducing the clutter, it is easier to find what we are looking for, it reduces storage requirements, and it decreases the University’s risk legally if records are over retained. By staying on top of the clutter we can easily navigate and evaluate our documents that have actual record value.
Think Spring and clean up your office and computer space! If you have any questions on what to do with your records, contact University Records Management (rm@syr.edu). We’d be happy to schedule a consultation.