University College for the Creative Arts at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester
Digital Records Management Procedures
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Use of network drives
All Staff have access to at least two network drives for their digital records: a personal network drive and a shared departmental/College drive. A personal network drive should only be used for confidential documents such as training plans and personnel assessments. Written permission has to be given before access to personal network drives can be given to others. In general, work should be saved to the shared departmental/College drive. A Departmental/College shared drive can have a folder within it named for example, temp docs. Within that, everyone can have their own named subfolder for work in progress documents. Thus if someone leaves or is absent for any reason, colleagues can still access work related documents. Work in progress documents are covered under the data protection act and should not therefore be stored on a personal drive or to the hard disk of your computer.
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Folder structures
Folder structures for shared drives should ensure all the digital records pertaining to the same activity or transaction can be readily located; responsibility for managing the shared drive should be delegated to a named person, as is already done in some areas. The “manager” of the shared drive should control the creation of new folders and sub-folders and ensure that all documents are held within a folder or subfolder. The folder structure can be organised to map to existing paper files to facilitate management of hybrid record series. Staff should also use the record series identified in the retention schedules as a basis for a folder structure. (E.g for Executive and Registry Services respectively, general correspondence-79; enrolment forms-142). This will facilitate correct deletion of digital records in line with paper files. 3 Naming Conventions: creating document and folder titles
Titles play a vital role in retrieving electronic documents efficiently. When formulated well, the title will indicate what the document is and whether it is the one that needs to be retrieved, without any further information. Good titles will also enable the logical display of documents in the file plan, either in alphabetical or date order, which again facilitates retrieval. Paying attention to naming documents encourages the use of the shared filing system since everyone will be confident that they can locate the information they need as quickly as possible. J:\Document store masters\Data Protection\Digrecsmgmt-proceduresFinal20070124.doc
Staff should be able to create meaningful names for documents and folders which ensure everyone will be able to locate the records they require. The document name should answer the questions: • • • What is this document? Is it the one I am looking for? Does it contain the information I need?
There should be enough information in the document title to describe the contents and the information should be arranged in such a way that the folder contents list displays in a helpful order which enables documents to be found easily by alphabet or date. Points to remember • For folder titles use job titles, project names or functions rather than the names of the people who do the job, manage the project or perform the function In general do not include elements of the folder name in the document title (this would not apply to committee papers where the document title would include the initial letters of the committee, eg HSC1506) Order the elements of the title to give the most useful information first e.g. for correspondence topic – recipient - date - document type and for policies, reports, procedures, guidelines etc, topic-type- datedocument type. The document type is usually the file extension. Examples illustrating how this would operate are given under bullet point 10. • • Use standard forms of names and acronyms which everyone will recognize. Use logical (e.g. mgmt for management; proc for procedures; guide for guidelines; mins for minutes; rec for records;) or agreed within the team abbreviations when necessary in document titles. Reverse personal names e.g. White, Mary not Mary White, so that the usual alphabetical order by surname is produced Use only words, except for date sequences where the format yyyy-mmdd will ensure documents are displayed in the correct date order e.g. 2005-01-11 2005-12-07
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Using names of the months will display the documents alphabetically e.g. 2005 April 2005 December 2005 January or April 2002 December 2004 January 2003 • Spaces and punctuation marks used in titles can affect the alphabetical display e.g. Report 2004 or Report-2004 will be displayed above Report2005, and forward or backward slashes (\ /) should not be used because they indicate a web address and will not be accepted Try not to exceed 25 characters including spaces (or preferably, hyphens) in the title name, especially if the document might eventually be accessed UCCA wide through the staff portal Document Store. The following examples show how the document naming system helps you to file and track documents. The type of document is apparent from the file extension (txt or html for emails or .doc, .xls etc for the usual Microsoft Office applications or .pdf for Adobe
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i. A request comes into a Freedom of Information Co-ordinator from J Bloggs for information that is available, but not on the publication scheme. She needs to ask a colleague, A Smith, for the information and files the outgoing email into her FOI requests folder as: Bloggsquery-SmithAinfo-20060811-html where Bloggsquery is the topic that everything connected to the request relates to, SmithA is the recipient of the email and info (for information) enables quick identification of why Smith was the recipient A Smith’s reply (which in this example came as an attached word document to an email) is filed as Bloggsquery-SmithAreply-20060814.doc The reply emailed to Bloggs is filed as Bloggsquery-BloggsJresponse-20060815-html The topic therefore remains the same for all the correspondence relating to the query and each component is easily identifiable. ii. The Probation Policy, once it was finalised and on the document store would be titled J:\Document store masters\Data Protection\Digrecsmgmt-proceduresFinal20070124.doc
probation-policyFinal-20060801.pdf whereas the master policy in Word, held only by HR, that would form the basis for any future revisions would be titled probation-policyFinal-20060801.doc with the review form titled probation-reviewform-2006.doc
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Version control
A consistent system of version control to track drafts and versions of documents should be implemented throughout UCCA. The National Archives recommends using “draft” followed by V1, 2 etc in the document title to indicate substantial changes and V1.01, .02 etc to indicate minor changes. The date must be added to the document title and standard footers with the file path must be included on all documents, apart from correspondence, so that both the date of creation and the version information is contained within the document. Where documents have had tracked changes it is essential that the final version accepts all changes but is then ‘saved as’ a new file name (which would include ‘final’) so that any tracked changes cannot be revealed. The example below demonstrates how version control would work during the preparation of the Conditions of Contract appendix to the financial regulations. The gatekeeper (originator) names the document Conditionscontract-appPfinregsV1-20060814 and sends it to three people for comment, asking them to save their documents as V1.01; 1.02 and 1.03 respectively. The gatekeeper then assembles V2 from the amendments and sends it round again, assigning V2.01 etc to the contributors. The final version has no V number but is designated Final. Conditionscontract-appPfinregsFinal-20060910 For simplicity and clarity, only the gatekeeper is to use Microsoft word version control . When using Microsoft Word version control, each user must have their user information area populated with their own user name. This is found under Tools Options User Information.
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