A Reboot Rooted in Compliance

Retirement Announcement: Barbara Benson

After almost 34 years as Director of Records Management Services at the University of Washington, I am retiring on 28 March 2025.  I am quite proud of the partnerships I’ve formed and the work we have been able to accomplish together. It’s been a long and sometimes bumpy road but in the end we have been able to mitigate a lot of risk for the UW over the years.  It’s a wonderful thing to be able to say that I am leaving the UW in a better place than I found it, while having created valued and lasting relationships.  It has been quite the satisfying ride.  I am also very happy to announce that Emily Lemieux, our current Assistant Director of Records Management Services, will be acting as Interim Director. 

A New Year of Compliance

Thanks to our collaborative partner offices and thoughtful attendees, we wrapped up a great Compliance and Ethics Week in February. If you missed it, you can still check out the recordings of events, tasks to accomplish, and links to browse on the event page.

Office of Research Training

We are very excited to announce the release of a new Records Management online training created in collaboration with the Office of Research.  Called “Records Management for Research Teams: The Basics”, this course provides an overview of the most important topics in research records management at the UW, including what constitutes a record, retention schedules, storage, file structure, and destruction best practices.  Based on focus group input, this one hour course is a requirement for completion of the CORE Certificate in Research Administration but can also be taken as a standalone by anyone interested in managing records and information related to research.

Plant Best Practices, Harvest Records Success: A Spring Clean Reset 

April is Records Management Month and Earth Day can be the perfect opportunity to freshen things up. Take this opportunity to make a spring clean reset and check that you are on the right track where the records in your office are concerned. This spring, grow your garden of records management knowledge. Join RMS staff to learn what you can get rid of immediately after you are done with it (the weeds of your records landscape), learn about retention periods in general, where you can save records, how to label them, and how to make sure they get deleted when the time comes, just like you’d put your garden scraps into the compost.  

Tuesday April 8, 2pm on Zoom – link here

Email to RSVP: elemieux@uw.edu

New General Schedule Series

Effective Immediately

We’ve had a series on our General Records Retention Schedule regarding Policies and Procedures for quite some time. But surely not all instructions (including self-created guides) are worthy of sending to the University Archives, right? Some will just do not contain substantive content that is tied to the central mission of your office. For those types of standard operating procedures, we have created the following series:

Internal Standard Operating Instructions

Informal step by step instructions for how to accomplish job tasks including how to organize basic logistics, where to click and type in an internal database, which people to provide with which information at different stages of a project, and where to save files and what to call them.

Refer to this series for substantive Policies and Procedures directly tied to the mission of the office.

Official Copy: Any office

Retention: Until superseded or no longer needed

Disposition Method: Shred or Delete

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