Document retention - non-legal stuff

[redfox]

I am the contract ED for a small, national org. We're a virtual org, no office. I have in my possession boxes of docs - mostly articles, newsletters, & press publications - from 1990 on. They are moldering & taking up room. They are a part of the history of this org... nonetheless, oy vey! I have not the room for nor the patience to scan all of these. Ideas?

[Lainey]

There are lots of vendors who will scan for you at relatively low cost. If possible can you get a few people to attend a review/edit party? A group decision to toss what's not wanted, keep what's necessary, then take those files only to the scanning company. Maybe they'd give you a price break if you're a charitable or not-for-profit. Put everything on a DVD or even a flash drive.

[Dhiana]

A kid with a smart phone and a scanning app? I use TurboScan on my iPhone. The documents can be saved as images or PDF which you could then send to a cloud account such as Dropbox.

[rosarugosa]

Does your organization have a formal records retention policy that would dictate how long to keep? I work for a large corporation that has retention rules for nearly everything. If not, maybe it would be a good idea to put one in place.

[jp1]

Also keep in mind that 47 states have laws requiring that an organization notify individuals if Personally Identifiable Information they have is lost or stolen notify those individuals. If these files are no longer necessary for the business it would be better to shred and dispose of them instead of keeping them forever.

[oldhat]

As the previous commenters have pointed out, you need to be careful if any of the docs in question contain personal info about clients, customers etc., or if your organization has a retention policy. In either case you may want to consult a lawyer before destroying any paper docs.

I'm currently in the process of digitizing a lot of personal paper. It's a slow and tedious process, but I have the time. If this is for your job, yeah, I'd look into a commercial service; I understand they aren't that pricey.

I'd be careful about backup--disks crash and flash drives get lost. Even though the loss of most of the stuff I'm scanning would be of little concern to anyone but me, I'm backing up everything in several different places.

[redfox]

Awesome advice, y'all! Thank you.

[rosarugosa]

Redfox: I checked my employer's retention schedule, and we would retain newsletters, articles and press publications for 3 years. I thought it might be helpful to have some idea of what other organizations do.