Most people in leadership positions focus on the present and the future. When conversation turns to an organization’s history, it is usually in connection with milestones such as anniversaries or leadership transitions.

Email remains the poster child for electronic records (mis)management, and with good reason. Many sources cite that 75% of all office work flows through email, and more recent figures put the figure at over 80%.

Data warehousing is a method via which structured records are available to support business functions. Data warehousing arises out of an organization’s need for dependable, consolidated, unique, and integrated reporting and analysis of its data at different levels of aggregation.

Organizations are expected to keep records that reflect how the organization operates.

In the lifecycle of electronic records, inactive storage offers several challenges. One of the strengths of archives and records management in the paper world was that records managers controlled inactive storage.

To effectively create and capture records, archivists need to decide on several issues at the organizational or business process level. Of the documentation being created, what needs to be captured as a record?

Digital preservation is a rich area of archival investigation, with several approaches available to archivists.

Archivists Mark Greene and Todd Daniels-Howell, who were both employed at the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), focused on the role of business records within that large collecting repository, which had state government records and a responsibility to document a geographic area as well as topics.

Records managers develop retentions and approve disposals to clear unneeded records while at the same time advocating for planned preservation of those records that need to be retained for the long term.