Managing Electronic Public Records

Recognizing Perils and Avoiding Pitfalls

Office Policies, Cont'd.

Retention Schedules

A policy that is definitely already in place is your agency's records retention and disposition schedule. It is important that the agency make sure the retention schedule is updated as needed. This is especially important to remember when your office is changing what formats records are saved as. If your agency is moving from printing and filing records, to storing them digitally – in a database, or even just Word documents – that change needs to be noted in your schedule. For example, if your office is considering a scanning project to replace your paper records, please consult DCR first.

When you're working with your records analyst to make these changes, he or she can also be a resource to answer questions and provide advice concerning the best formats. Remember that electronic formats are not always the best choices for long-term storage of records. Microfilm is a very stable, human-readable format that should be considered for archival records.

Selecting File Formats

The following factors should be considered when your office chooses the formats that are the best choice for both the office and for long-term access. Once these decisions are made, it's a good idea to incorporate these standards into your office policy, listing recommended formats for documents, spreadsheets, images, and any other file type, including databases. Does your office support Office 2007, or is Office 2003 still the standard? Do you want all final documents stored as PDFs or TIFFs?

• Wide-adoption: As mentioned earlier, Microsoft Word and other Office file formats have been widely-adopted across the state, so DCR is committed to finding ways to preserve those formats.
• Backward compatibility: Some departments in North Carolina have been dealing with the confusion that comes along with managing Office 2007 file formats, such as .docx, along with the older formats, such as .doc. Those users with Office 2007, though, could automatically view older files, because Office 2007 is backward compatible with the older file formats.
• Good metadata support: The more information that is stored with a file, the better you will be able to preserve it.
• Functionality: The file format should be as useful as possible, but not too complicated. For example, geospatial data is incredibly complicated because it consists of a lot of relationships among layers of data of all different types. So if you don't need the geospatial data in its original form, which could be something called a shapefile, a TIFF image of the map might be easier to save.
• Error-checking: Your system should periodically monitor files for corruption and log any events that it finds. Additionally, if you have corrupted files, you should be able to replace those files with a correct copy.
• Upgrade cycle: The more supported a file format is by its creator, the better quality that format will have. We have confidence in the PDF file format because Adobe has consistently updated and improved the file format over the years and they are expected to continue to do so.

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