Newsletter: In 2024, Events For You And More!

New Year, New Events

Compliance & Ethics Week 2024

This year’s Compliance & Ethics Week will take place from January 22-26, 2024. The purpose of this event is to raise awareness about compliance-related topics and reinforce ethical values for building a stronger UW. It’s your chance as an office to make sure your day-to-day workflows follow established best practices and follow state, federal, and University legal requirements. It’s your chance as an individual to start the year off right!

We’ve teamed up with partner offices across the UW for this event. We’ll provide trainings and resources for you to review and a list of actionable tasks for you to complete. We’ll also be hosting a live Zoom series called “Coffee & Compliance” at 10am each morning of that week covering a range of engaging topics. Block off time on your calendar and prepare to participate in what’s sure to be an engaging and informative event.

Data Privacy Day

January 28 is Data Privacy Day, an international event designed to raise awareness about the importance of protecting personal data. The UW Privacy Office is excited to offer free professional development opportunities throughout January for UW personnel and students to learn more about privacy. Check out their event page for more information. Records Management is proud to be a part of the UW Privacy Principles Playbook event.

Thursday, Jan 18, 2024,  9–9:50 a.m.

Celebrate National Clean-out Your Computer Day with the ROT Squad

The ROT Squad has helped a wide variety of offices clean up their shared drives, and they’ve seen it all. In honor of National Clean-out Your Computer Day, attend this live demo of how to find common types of ROT that often lurk in shared electronic storage locations. Afterwards, you’ll surely be inspired to get started cleaning out records yourself.

Thursday, February 8, 2-3 p.m.

Looking for a New Year's resolution?

A new calendar year brings an opportunity to clean up any redundant records that have an “end of calendar year” cut-off.

You can purge your calendars (and appointment books, daily schedules and, phone logs) 1 year after the end of the calendar year. If you use an Outlook or Google calendar, for example you may delete your 2022 calendar (or older) this month (example: 12/31/22 + 1 year = 12/31/23). We designed a resource specifically geared towards Outlook users on how to do just that. All you have to do is follow these simple steps.

Moreover, many series on our General Records Retention Schedule follow this same “end of calendar year” cut-off rule. We suggest you check to see if any of your records (paper and/or electronic records) follow this specific retention policy and then purge any eligible records that have reached the end of their retention periods.  Do make sure you only shred or delete records that are not subject to an audit, litigation, investigation, or public records request. You can apply the retention rule formula outlined above and adjust it based on your record’s legally approved retention period: 12/31/xx + x years/months = disposition date. If you can’t find the appropriate record series for your documents and files on the General Records Retention Schedule, it may help to check and see if your office/department has a customized Departmental Records Retention Schedule.

Once you’ve purged any eligible records, you can set up a reminder to repeat the process for the next calendar year.

Good to know: RRTDs in UW-IT’s Document Management System (DMS)

If your office or department is storing records in UW-IT’s document management system (aka, DMS or DocFinity), you may have to manually enter RRTDs (Records Retention Trigger Dates) for certain documents. Manual entry may be required for documents that follow an event-based cut-off rule. “Cut-off” is what must occur for the record to become inactive. “Event-based” means that rather than the retention period triggering on a recurring point in time (at the end of calendar, fiscal or academic year), it is triggered by an event.

For example, many HR records have a “Termination of employment” cut-off rule. The employee termination date may not be known when an administrator is uploading a document into DMS. The system cannot calculate an appropriate disposition date if an RRTD is never entered, the document thus living in the system in perpetuity. If you store any records of that nature in DocFinity, our strong recommendation is to create a systematic workflow to identify these documents and enter RRTDs so that the DMS can implement the disposition process for documents that have reached the end of their legally required retention period.

If you’re an administrator and you’re unsure how to do that, we have compiled a handy step-by-step guide on how to manually set the RRTD on a single or multiple documents. If you have questions about the RRTD date for your DocFinity records, please don’t hesitate to contact us at recmgt@uw.edu.

FETCH THE FUTURE...GO DIGITAL
Click here to watch the video on this new University-wide initiative.