With just three weeks left to our residencies, we are all in the midsts of wrapping up our projects (and thus this post is going to be a short one). Here at BAM, I am waist deep in documentation and making sure that there are understandable and tangible actions points to be taken after I leave.

A big action point is the planning for a facilitated records transferring event this summer 2016. While creating Records Retention Schedules for an institution is a huge step, getting people to comply and actually transfer records to the Archive, is a totally different story. Understandably, it can be challenging to make records management a priority when peoples’ jobs are already so demanding. With this in mind, as part of this project, we asked each Department Head to appoint a Records Retention Coordinator within their department so that the Archives can have a specific point person with whom to communicate about transferring, identifying, and describing archival records. This summer, during BAM’s regularly scheduled “Digital Clean-Up Day,” the Archives are planning to set up a “Records Transferring Lab” where Records Retention Coordinators will be required to schedule a one-on-one appointment with the Archives and learn how to electronically transfer records into the Archive using AVPreserve’s file transfer tool, Exactly.

In conjunction with this Records Transferring Lab, we are hoping to provide general tips on electronic file management. We identified the most significant issues that came-up across the institution in the process of conducting our records retention interviews, and created this one-pager of advice. (I’m actually still working on this, but here’s what it looks like so far:)