Electronic Records at the UW
Any information created, received, maintained or used by the University of Washington is considered a record, regardless of physical form or characteristics. In order to comply with RCW 40.14 Preservation and Destruction of Public Records, each employee has the legal responsibility to demonstrate proper care and management of their records. An E-Record Policy can help you maintain your electronic records in accordance with their legally approved retention schedules. It will ensure intentionality about the management of digital records; where they are stored, how they are organized, how they are protected, and how they are purged at the end of their retention period.
An E-Record Policy serves a different purpose and function from a Scanning Policy. If your unit is interested in scanning paper records into a digital format in order to legally replace the original paper documents, please visit our separate Scanning Policies Resource to create a Scanning Policy with our office.
Enterprise Systems
The University of Washington has several enterprise systems which allow departments to upload and attach their digital records. Today, these enterprise systems have expanded to include Workday and UW’s enterprise Document Management System. Records saved to these UW Enterprise Systems do not need to be included in this Policy. Those records will be managed within those systems. Once a record is uploaded and attached to the Enterprise System, any and all local copies of the record should be deleted.
Before beginning, check to see if your unit/office/department already has an E-Record Policy
Electronic Record Policy
To assist offices in managing their electronic records, our office has created an online E-Record Policy Builder
The Electronic Record Policy builder contains five sections:
- Purpose
- Scope
- Storage Location and Access
- Filing and Organization
- Preservation and Disposition
You will be asked to answer some straightforward questions about each of these topics. If you are unable to answer a particular question, you can scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save Draft and return to it once you have gathered the necessary information.
After you complete this module, your draft Policy will be sent to Records Management Services for review. If we have any questions or need clarification, we will contact you at the email you provided. Records Management Services will create a draft Policy based on your answers and will work with you to finalize the Policy. Policies can be reviewed, revisited and revised as needed. Once completed, your local unit/office/department will have a standard operating procedure for the management of your unstructured electronic information.
Click here to log in with your UW Net ID and begin
If you would prefer to draft your own File Plan from scratch, click here to view the Steps to Developing a New File Plan. Once working through these steps and some making decisions on records storage locations and access rights, you will subsequently be able to easily insert your answers into the Electronic Record Policy Builder.
Please contact us at recmgt@uw.edu or 206-543-0573 if you have any questions or need to make any changes to your Policy.