Records Management

The book I read to research this post was Records Management For Dummies which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. This is quite an interesting subject and vital to any business and the book does cover it admirably. The responsibly for collating records shouldn't be dumped on one individual but rather each department with in a company should share the responsible. It helps if someone in each department sorts through the documents and sorts them according to category. Some records like the minutes of the board of directors meeting should be stored indefinitely. Legally certain documents have to be stored for minimum periods of time as set out in statute books. In addition emails have to be stored albet electronically in case of any legal queries according to the Sarbanne-Oxley in America. Of course in Britain there are similar laws. One thing worth considering for long term electronic storage is Glacier the cloud storage service from Amazon Web Services where stuff is stored in bulk and for long term use but it has a slow access time. Another option is enterprise content management or document management software which can store stuff locally and an example of the former is Sharepoint which can search through a company intranet for requested information. There is also heavy duty databases like SQL Server or Windows Azure & for data mining SAS & SASS with the latter 2 services also being able to process data mined from Social Media sites. Things like hard drives have to be destroyed responsibility with no chance of the data being recoverable. A good organization for this is NAID or national association for information destruction at http://naid.org. Often at least some information will have to be stored on paper in file cabinets the preferred method is alphabetically but some number the document and store them numerically because it is simpler. You can also store stuff onsite with a RAID system which stores stuff on multiple hard drives including parity information in case a hard drive fails. I did really enjoy this book and it is a useful subject to know about after all especially if you are a manager you never know if your boss is going to give you this responsibility and this book does explain in an easy to understand way.