Newsletter: Seas the Day: Manage Your Records

AUGUST 2024

Plan, don’t cram, for the new academic year

The start of the academic year is a great time to build a folder structure for the records you know you’ll be handling starting in September. Make it easier on yourself before the busy quarter starts by getting your records in order now.

• Check out our Educator’s Toolkit for some great tips on managing teaching-related records.
• Review the Advisors’ Retention Schedule for common student-related records series.
• Build your email and individual storage folder structures based on our Best Practices for Folder Structures, including Example Folder Structures for Student and Curriculum-related Records.
• Take our brief online training Managing Student Records.
• Use your calendar to schedule monthly email clean-up sessions with yourself. Email rotsquad@uw.edu to set up a quiet co-working session with us via Zoom (we have email to sort too!).

Need advice? Reach out to us at recmgt@uw.edu. Suffering from a backlog of redundant, obsolete, and transitory records in any format? Contact the ROT Squad for help at rotsquad@uw.edu.

Trivia of the month

This year, we are working on a project called Guard Dawgs where we are making sure people who have records with very long retention periods have systems in place to properly safeguard them. But really, everyone should take good care of all the records in their office, while recognizing that vital records are especially important. Refer to this resource on our website for more information on Vital Records. For this month’s trivia question, we’re focusing on the Guard Dawgs theme.

Of the following records disasters, three are fictional and one is real. Which of these actually happened in UW history?

1. A phishing attempt by a Russian hacker targeted towards someone who worked on the student database led to a lack of access to the SDB. Students had to sign up for their classes using paper forms for a summer quarter. Then, someone in the registrar’s office accidentally spilled coffee on hundreds of loose forms, causing records chaos.  
2. An employee in UW marketing cleared out someone’s old desk when they left (including the open bag of half-eaten chips) and put it all in a file cabinet. When Dubs came to visit, he chewed up all the old photos of previous mascots Frosty and Denali, which had never been transferred to the UW Archives.
3. Someone from an eco-terrorist group broke into the UW Center for Urban Horticulture, planted an incendiary device that burst into flames and caused over a million dollars in damages severely damaging the library, destroying the offices of research faculty members, and melted hundreds of slides, including some illustrating the step-by-step recovery of Mount St. Helens.
4. An employee in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences had two years of research data about a rare jellyfish in Maui on their laptop, which was not backed up. They left the laptop on the light rail and lost all the project data.

Moving offices? Don’t move your garbage too!

Are you moving your office to the new University District Station Building this fall/ winter? Do you have boxes of paper records and are not sure what can be thrown away and what needs to be kept? Contact the ROT Squad for help (rotsquad@uw.edu) and schedule a clean-up day for your whole office.

Emails piling up?

FETCH THE FUTURE...GO DIGITAL