Washington State defines a record as information regardless of physical form or characteristics. Chat/instant messages, tweets, texts and any other forms of written communication are subject to retention requirements and to public records requests. Because it is so difficult to capture these communications, we strongly advise not using them for approvals or to provide customized or unique advice to a student or employee. Those messages are best relayed through email.

Like email, the content of the message determines the retention. Generally, most if not all of these messages can be considered transitory and will fall under the listing for email you can delete in the UW Email Best Practices.

If approvals or unique advice is communicated to a student or employee via instant message, text, or a tweet, we advise that the conversation be saved to a more robust records repository (such as a network shared drive or an official UW email account) and retained based on its retention on the UW Records Retention Schedule. Contact us at recmgt@uw.edu or 206-543-0573 for help identifying a specific record series.