The metadatabase: the future of the retention schedule as a records management tool Available to Purchase

Records management has undergone an unprecedented process of change in the last few years. This has been chiefly due to the proliferation of information technology and the rapid pace of organisational change. It is my belief that current criticisms of the retention schedule as a records management tool are largely justified because the traditional retention schedule programme has failed to keep pace with these changes. This paper proposes that the full potential of the retention schedule has not been recognised in many organisations. It argues that if it is possible to identify overall retention requirements at a series level it should also be possible to identify other properties and descriptive values that can also be assigned to each series in advance of records creation It then discusses the range of such properties that it is possible to define at this point and begins to explore how, if automated, these values can act not only as the basis of future systems design, but can also be used as the point of control for virtually all records management functions.