Records Clean Up

While departments are ultimately responsible for organizing, maintaining, and disposing of records, the Records & Information Management Office can offer direction on best practices when cleaning up physical and electronic records. This can include identifying records for destruction, proposing improved storage and organization options, and recommending storage spaces.

Paper Records

RIM will advise on the appropriateness of in-office and on-site storage locations and their compliance with the Physical Records Storage Standards. Before contacting RIM, gather as much information as possible on the records, such as the type of records, date range the records cover, and the volume (number of boxes or filing cabinets). 

Based on the results of that review, RIM can recommend next steps, including destruction of records that have met retention or transfer to off-site storage for those that have not. Departments are responsible for contacting UVA Recycling and disposing of records identified by RIM as eligible for destruction.

Electronic Records

Departments are responsible for managing their electronic spaces, including shared drives, Teams Channels, and SharePoint sites.

TreeSize

RIM can review records stored on shared drives, in M365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams), or other cloud services (Box, Google Drive) with the use of a disk scan product called TreeSize.

This product allows RIM to:

• Provide a detailed file-level report of contents (shared drives only).
• Review records to determine retention requirements.
• Identify records that are eligible for destruction.
• Advise on transfer of records to different storage medium.
• Complete the certificate of records destruction (RM3).

RIM may also be able to automate some deletion processes on behalf of the department (shared drives only).