Housekeeping - upcoming events, speaker scheduling for summer term, meeting time
Discussion with University Records Manager, Maryrose Hightower-Coyle: Records Management for Cultural Repositories on Campus
Q1: Can you give an overview of how records management works at UT? How does this differ from other institution types (government, private sector etc.)
Q2: What are the challenges that you face day-to-day? What challenges do you anticipate for the future?
Q3: Can you give an overview of the types of records you deal with? Does it vary a lot between departments?
Q4: Do you provide specific training on born digital records? From your perspective, how do they differ from paper records?
Q5: Do you have to deal with complex digital object or databases? How does this impact your work?
Q6: How is training being conducted? Do you meet in person with decision-makers in each department?
Q7: Do you follow up with departments if they don't adhere to their retention schedules?
Q8: Who's responsibility is it to flag potentially sensitive information?
Q9: How actively do departments participate in records retention and contact you about disposal?
Q10: The Briscoe center, as the home of the UT archives, sometimes receives material directly from departments, not through records management, is this an issue?
Q11: By what process do materials pass into the archives? How is this decision made? How archives and records management interact?
Denise Besserat (linguist) wrote "How Writing Came About"
Interpreted Sumerian tokens as accounting records
How will our culture be interpreted someday?
Legally, every public institution is required to have a records management program and officer
Texas Library sets the standards and guidelines for Texas institutions (Texas code 441)
The records management program is tied to open records law (Texas code 552)
Ensures public access
Some vendor systems are not set up to provide access, which causes difficulties
State records consist of pretty much everything we do
Records management systems
An enterprise document management system will be purchased in fall
System will capture, manage, generate and handle docu-sign
currently decommissioning old system
digital objects are in poor condition
Will have a governance committee in development phase of putting system out for community use
Will conduct info sessions for new system all through summer
describe toolkit, come up with use-cases
Preservation will be emphasized in the front-end of the process
Working more closely with IT to ID upstream born-digital materials that will have historic value
Hope to implement quickly after purchase
President's office may be the first department for implementation
Private sector vs. public
No open access requirement in private sector
Goals of RM:
Help business do its business
respond to audits, regulations and provide evidence
Provide access and consider historical value (public institutions only)
Some private corporations are starting to consider historical value, but obv. they are not required to do so.
Records management at Universities
Universities are in a gray area
Some materials are consider state records, others are not
Papers written by a professor are not considered state records
Interest in "protecting the student experience"
Communications between students and professors are protected
Student names in the context of student activities are also protected
Lots of donations come in which are not considered state records
Universities exempted from requirements to send their historic records to the State archive
Universities can send their state records to a university archive
Records retention schedule must still comport with the requirements put forth by the Texas State Library
Archivists have final discretion over whether materials have lasting historic value and should therefore be archived
Some collections are specifically flagged as having historic value, or tending to have historic value
Departments can request to dispose of records through records management, release for destruction or send to archives
Record manager keeps documentation of any transfer
Jessi: How does this process distinguish between state and non-state records?
Maryrose: regulations only apply to state records
Maryrose focuses on building relationships with departments across campus
facilitates tranfers directly to archives of non-state records
Knows who is in compliance and can follow-up, but don't have a lot of resources to devote to follow-up- relies on good relationships
Conducts a lot of training sessions for staff of various departments
Digital preservation
There will likely be a gap in our institutional history- paper keeps for ages, but digital assets have already been lost
Advocating for better digital preservation
Records management tends to get delegated down- hard to meet with actual decision makers
Need for more education/brochure for higher-ups to educate them about the importance of this work
When decommissioning old system, will need to think about the old data inside
Records management systems are designed to preserve data for the length of the retention schedule
Archiving is not in their purview
Digital teaching objects can be very complex
Digital asset management systems are needed to handle them
The Teaching and Learning department has taken over a lot of these objects
Digital asset managers need to get together with archivists and records managers to make preservation decisions about these objects
Confidentiality issues
Confidential records: records which the university is not required to produce upon request
records are public by law, but law includes 79 exceptions
There is also a body of rulings by the state AG that set precedent for stuff to not be made available
University can request a ruling from the AG if they think records should remain confidential
All other records must be produced on request, but are not otherwise published
If staff ID records that they think have historic value, they can contact records manager and have sent to archives
records with historic value tend not to contain confidential information
President's office is a tricky situation
May try to close the records at least temporarily so that records manager can look them over, this may encourage compliance from department
The sheer volume and diversity of records is an issue
600 record series to deal with
Discrete sections of a record series may have additional retention requirements which make disposition complicated
Additional notes
Departments are not supposed to destroy things that aren't accounted for in their retention schedules
Records managers must have a relationship with the department so that when new record types spring up, RM is made aware and can come up with retention schedules
Records managers have no enforcement mechanism- again, must rely on good working relationships
Internal audits sometime enforces records retention- reports directly to President's office
Transitory information can be deleted as soon as it has served its purpose
ex.: written notes that are then transferred to a more permanent medium
Maryrose sits on a records management committee for Texas
Comes up with shared retention schedules
talk about institutional practices
come to agreement on retention policies
Action items
Donna J Coates will send out more information about upcoming SAA webinars
Jessica Wesley Meyerson will contact Becky Romanchuk at the Texas State Library about an Archives Space evaluation
Look into possibility of future talk by Jennifer Hecker or Adam Rabinowitz on their projects?