Records and Information Management year in review

In July 2024 I joined the GCO Archives team as the Records and Information Lead. What exactly does that mean? Well, sometimes I ask myself the same question. So, it can help to look back at what we’ve accomplished this year in records management, to help lay the groundwork for where we are heading and what it means for all United Church of Canada staff.

Accomplishments

For the first time since 2013, two major pieces of UCC recordkeeping policies were updated and published:

1. Records and Information Management Policy and Procedures
2. Classification and Records Retention Schedules (CRS)

The new policies and procedures incorporate digital recordkeeping practices, in particular the use of SharePoint for active records and RecordPoint for digital records management. The updated CRS is built into the file plan of RecordPoint, helping us to categorize and schedule records that staff store in SharePoint.

After a lot of preparatory work, the infrastructure of RecordPoint was set, and over the past several months we have begun performing scheduled disposition on digital records for the first time. Working with staff to destroy records and by decommissioning unneeded sites, we have been able to destroy over 250,000 records/files so far this year.

A big focus for 2025 is on communication and training with UCC staff at the General Council and regional council level. I’ve done several records management introduction sessions with units and many targeted unit site reviews with staff.

• 8 sessions with GC units, approx. 75 staff attendees
• 2 sessions with regional councils, approx. 35 staff attendees
• 28 individual sharepoint site reviews with approx. 30 staff members

Concerns and collaboration

Why are we doing all of this? Why does it matter to write it down in a blog post?

Well, first of all, digital storage is costly. As we continue to transition to a largely digital world and records proliferate in different locations and forms (think email, databases, personal drives, shared drives), it becomes vital to make sure we have an understanding of the information we are creating and managing, in order to mitigate risk, lessen storage costs, and improve collaboration in the organization.

Secondly, information management and governance can have a beneficial impact on how you work. Think about the digital records and files you have. Would anybody else be able to navigate your folders and find information? Is there duplication? Is there outdated material that you don’t need anymore? Have you been hoarding emails from 10 years ago? If you answered yes to any of these questions, don’t worry, you are totally normal. The problem is, there isn’t really that much time in the day to clean things up. And that’s where records management, and a Records and Information Lead, comes in. I’m here to provide guidance and help support these activities that for most staff end up lower on the priority list. Other responsibilities include reducing clutter, setting up naming conventions, designing metadata structures, and automating disposition of shared records.

A typical records review process

Many of you have met me in the past year and know a bit about what my reviews look like. This is an iterative process, the goal being to work together to develop strategies and structures that allow me to accurately categorize the records that you create and store in SharePoint. We want the way you work with records to be intuitive and beneficial for your workflows, while also connecting with certain basic records management theories so that we can trust the records that we are seeing in SharePoint and confidently make decisions on what to do with them.

The process looks like this:

1. Typically, I will export a spreadsheet using RecordPoint, which contains all the records from a given SharePoint site (see image above)
2. I review the sheet and make suggested changes to record categories where necessary.
3. After my initial pass, I meet with staff who work in the site to go over the current status. I explain the retention schedules for the categories they see, specific areas that I’ve highlighted for further review, and any questions, comments or concerns that they have.
4. Usually, these meetings result in a couple of action points – for example, I learn that a folder was categorized incorrectly and can go and change the schedule.
5. Staff are given the spreadsheet to look through and sign off on the remaining disposition decisions.
6. Any disposition that can be done immediately is completed. Thus far, this is usually low-hanging fruit, such as duplicate files, temp files, and other folders that staff already knew needed to be destroyed.
7. Steps are taken to help improve the classification of records and organization of the site, and then the process is repeated in order to refine our decisions.

Step 7 provides an opportunity to develop new workflows that incorporate records management principles. For example, we may set up a new metadata field in your site which helps label certain groups of records. Based on this label, we can now target these groups for archival transfer or destructions without further review. Recently, several units including HR, IT, and the Office of Vocation have begun to develop unique metadata structures that allow for records to be organized simply and effectively.

Concluding thoughts

In the past year, it has been interesting to see a variety of reactions to the emphasis on digital records management. The push to dispose of records through destruction or archival transfer is new for everyone, and change can be difficult and slow-moving. One thing I have tried to emphasize is that not everything is going to be solved at once, but small steps can be big successes. This work is all moving toward an end goal of easing everyone’s burden, whether coming from an IT, an archives, a committee or a regional council perspective. Education or simply awareness is a big part of this work. This year I’ve worked on setting up an infrastructure and planting the seed in people’s minds about the implications of creating and storing digital records, at each step. Who you are sharing it with and how it is being shared, how you are naming the file, information you add on to the file, how long you keep that file, are all things that can add up over time to have a big impact on work efficiency, security of sensitive information, storage and time-saving costs, and quality of records created.

In the coming years the goal is to develop these competencies and collaborative work with the archives team further to make records management a standardized and essential part of everyone’s work.