Content Manager 25.2 Content Manager

# Retention Schedules and disposal of records

A retention or disposal schedule prescribes the disposal treatment for classes of recurring records as agreed upon by the creating office, department or as laid down by legislation. In this contenxt, disposal can mean destruction as well as archiving.

The Content Manager feature Retention Management enables you to use retention and disposition schedules to control the entire life cycle of your records so that you can eventually conduct an orderly disposal by destroying unwanted records, or archiving your important records for future reference. For this functionality to be available, the feature Retention Management must be selected in the System Options Features page.

The feature Advanced Disposal Processing provides more functions to identify the records for disposal, review consignments, manage disposition conflicts, collect approval and carry out the disposal for the organisation's record archivist.

It is essential that archivists familiarise themselves with the concepts of retention and disposition schedules and the way they are implemented in Content Manager, which is described below.

Retention Schedules

Retention Schedules are applied to records in Content Manager to make the records inactive, destroyed, or archived according to a conditional schedule, reflecting the organisational needs, whether it be for legal, practical, or any other reasons.

Each Retention Schedule reflects an approved standard of dealing with the different types of records, for example regarding accidents, complaints, correspondence, recruitment or personnel, to name but a few. You can use publicly available Retention Schedules or create your own.

For example, you might want to move an important administration document to an off-site archive six years after the last time it was used.

You can prescribe this action by applying a Retention Schedule to the Content Manager record that represents the document, outlining the archive action by using the trigger: Archive (Transfer Custody) Six Years after Last Action.

By applying the Retention Schedule in Content Manager, you can now use this future event to find all the records that are due to be archived off site on a certain date or during a particular timeframe.

When the document is due to be archived, you can locate the document, send it off, transferring custody for the record to the outside agency, and then change the Content Manager record dispositon to Archived (Custody Transferred), which will also destroy the electronic record of the document.

This process works equally with sets of documents, like files, and you can apply Retention Schedules to any record or container.

Disposition / disposal

During its lifetime, a document or file can be in regular use, then not used any more, later possibly in a local archive or the archive of a storage provider, and finally, destroyed. These stages in a record's life are reflected in the Disposition field in Content Manager.

The Retention Schedule dictates the disposal actions for the records it is applied to, and therefore, controls the current disposal status in the field Disposition.

There are only two ways to dispose of a record in Content Manager:

- It will be destroyed
- It will be archived - either keeping it on site, or transferring it off site

These two options translate to the following possible Disposition field values and their meaning:

- Active - the record is in regular use, and either in circulation or in an active storage area, like a filing cabinet
- Inactive - the record is not in active, regular use any more, but not due for disposal yet.

  This could be because the record's Retention Schedules prescribes to make the disposition Inactive, for example, one year after the last time the record was modified.

- Destroyed - the record has reached the end of its life and has been physically destroyed, and also electronically
- Archived (Keep Forever) - the record is kept forever within the organisation's own archive facility
- Archived (Custody Transferred) - the record and custody of that record were transferred to another agency. When the receiving agency has acknowledged receipt of the physical record, in Content Manager, the electronic record is destroyed.

To set these dispositions, the Retention Schedule uses triggers of the corresponding types as described under Retention Schedules above. When the time for the disposal of the record has come, the organisation's Record Archivist carries them out by using either the standard Content Manager disposal function as described in Changing record disposition, or the advanced function as described in Advanced disposal of records.

Disposition date calculation

Whenever a record is updated, Content Manager re-calculates the date for the next disposal action as an intrinsic part of the update. Whenever a Retention Schedule is changed, you can choose to do the necessary re-calculations for the records it applies to immediately, or defer it to be done later.

Each Content Manager record and container record can have its own Retention Schedule, and therefore, its own disposition status. Therefore, when changing the disposition of a container record, Content Managerchecks the Retention Schedules of the records in the container; and if the container disposition change would break a rule for any of its records, it would not allow the change until the conflict is resolved.

For example, the container may be due for destruction now, but there is a document in the container that is supposed to be kept for another seven years or has an incomplete workflow. In this scenario, Content Manager would not allow you to destroy the container and you would need to resolve the conflict first, for example, either by moving the record to a different container, or changing the disposition schedule of the folder or the document. See Reviewing a record's Retention Schedule.

Archive Boxes

To make it easier to transport files, they are usually packed into archive boxes. These boxes can be checked in to Content Manager as records.

NOTE: You do not have to create archive boxes in Content Manager, this is just an example. You can create any equivalent.

The Record Type Archive Box would not usually have a Retention Schedule applied, as Archive Boxes are merely a vehicle to move physical files.

- For more information about applying Retention Schedules to records, see Applying Retention Schedules to records.
- For more information about changing a container, see Setting or changing containers.

Related information

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Version 25.2 | Last updated April 2025
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Product: Content Manager 25.2

Topic Title: Retention Schedules and disposal of records