A week and a half ago, when every­one on the East coast was prepar­ing for Hur­ri­cane Sandy, most of us were think­ing about water, flash­lights, sump pump backup power, and gaso­line. How many peo­ple took the time to make sure that they had their vital per­sonal records accounted for and safe­guarded in the event that the storm did more than take down some branches in the back­yard? Those of us who were lucky enough to weather the storm with­out sus­tain­ing sig­nif­i­cant dam­age can look at those who lost every­thing and use the jolt of “That could have been me…” to prompt us to take mea­sures to pro­tect one of our most impor­tant per­sonal assets.

Per­sonal vital records include (but are not lim­ited to) the following:

• Birth/marriage/death cer­tifi­cates, divorce decrees;
• Adop­tion records;
• Pass­ports, driver’s licenses, health insur­ance cards, work IDs, other photo IDs;
• Cur­rent pho­tographs of house­hold members;
• Con­tracts, leases, and mortgages;
• Deeds for real prop­erty and titles for your cars;
• Insur­ance poli­cies (homeowner’s, auto, health, den­tal, life, etc.);
• Records and access infor­ma­tion for all finan­cial accounts (bank, credit card, invest­ment, etc.)
• Records of legal proceedings;
• Wills and estate plans;
• Immu­niza­tion and med­ical his­tory records;
• Pre­scrip­tions (med­ical, vision, etc.);
• Tax returns and sup­port­ing documentation;
• Emer­gency infor­ma­tion (e.g., con­tact infor­ma­tion for fam­ily, friends, doc­tors, insur­ance com­pa­nies, and con­trac­tors and util­ity companies);
• House­hold inven­tory (pro­vides replace­ment value evi­dence for insur­ance purposes);
• Social Secu­rity cards and records;
• Edu­ca­tional records (tran­scripts, diplo­mas, etc.);
• Employ­ment records (resume, employ­ment his­tory, ref­er­ence con­tact infor­ma­tion, salary history);
• Mil­i­tary ser­vice records;
• Records for your pet(s); and last, but not least,
• Unique records that have sen­ti­men­tal value (fam­ily pho­tographs, video, keep­sakes, etc.).

Many of these records can be replaced if you lose them, although that will take a lot more time and effort (and money!) than pro­tect­ing the ones you already have. Some of your records can’t be replaced. These are records that you’ll sur­vive with­out, but they’re the ones that you’ll truly regret los­ing (e.g., the video of your baby’s first steps, or let­ters from a deceased loved one).

You should keep your vital records together (in one con­tainer if pos­si­ble) so that you can take them with you if you need to evac­u­ate and you should update them reg­u­larly. These records may be elec­tronic or they may be phys­i­cal (paper, pho­tographs, video­tapes, etc.) Your plan for main­tain­ing them should take their for­mat into con­sid­er­a­tion. You may want to keep copies of cer­tain records in a safe deposit box or with a trusted friend or rel­a­tive (who doesn’t live next door, in case they suf­fer from the same dis­as­ter!) This is also a good option for cases where you don’t have a chance to get the records before the dis­as­ter strikes. A fire-proof safe in your home is another good stor­age option. Another option, if you have cho­sen to dig­i­tize records as a backup, is to use online stor­age, which may be a ser­vice offered through the com­pany that pro­vides your home inter­net con­nec­tion (or you can choose from any of a large num­ber of com­pa­nies that offer this as their pri­mary ser­vice). Just make sure key peo­ple (e.g., your spouse, chil­dren, your lawyer, or a trusted friend) have access to the records in the event that you are unable to do so. They will need to know the phys­i­cal loca­tion of the records (and know how to gain access to that loca­tion) or will need login infor­ma­tion for the server where the records are stored.

Iden­ti­fy­ing, locat­ing, and safe­guard­ing your vital records is not a quick and easy task, but it can save enor­mous amounts of time and money and is the best way to pre­vent impor­tant records from being destroyed in the event of a disaster.

Step 1: Review your records and iden­tify which ones are the most impor­tant to you and your fam­ily. This is a good time to destroy your obso­lete records.

Step 2: Put orig­i­nals together in a con­tainer you can take with you or in a home safe or a bank safe deposit box.

Step 3: Make copies (elec­tronic or pho­to­copies) of these records for active use and to serve as a back-up if the orig­i­nals are destroyed. Keep a copy with some­one you trust or keep an elec­tronic backup online.

Step 4: Make sure every­one who should know how to access these records knows how to do so. Like­wise, make sure that you keep the records as secure as pos­si­ble. This is per­sonal and con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion that you do not want just any­one to gain access to.

Tak­ing these steps to pro­tect your per­sonal records will not only help in the case of a dis­as­ter but will also sup­port your reg­u­lar house­hold oper­a­tions as it pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity to orga­nize your records and purge the obso­lete ones. Happy recordkeeping!

I’ve put together this set of best prac­tices for units that are con­sid­er­ing (or are already actively) dig­i­tiz­ing paper records and using the elec­tronic ver­sion in place of the paper orig­i­nal. This is intended to help you make sure that you are scan­ning records at an accept­able level of qual­ity for uni­ver­sity pur­poses. Please address any ques­tions to me (, University Records Manager).

1. The scan must be complete (e.g., for a given credit card statement, every receipt and missing original receipt form must be included);
2. The scan must be legible. Review scans for legibility periodically as a part of regularly conducted quality control. Considerations for legibility include ensuring that:
   1. The scan is not blurred or indistinguishable;
   2. Each individual document is captured completely; and
   3. The resulting image is not crooked or skewed.
3. The document must be scanned at a resolution that will capture the finest significant details of the original, typically a minimum resolution of 150 dpi;
4. The scan must be saved in PDF or TIFF format and must not be further altered; and
5. The scan must be saved in a location that is known, identifiable, secure, and backed up on a regular basis by OIT or by in-unit IT staff. As with paper records, scanned records must be accessible when needed, and kept in a secure location to prevent accidental or intentional alteration or loss.

Please note that these standards are the minimum required and will be acceptable for most non-permanent records. In some instances higher standards may be appropriate. For example, if an original document is faded or badly printed, the scan may need to be done at a higher resolution or the image may need manipulation to make it legible. The ultimate goal, in adhering to these standards, is to produce reproductions of the original records that will serve as acceptable supporting documentation for internal and external audits, audits by regulatory agencies, and legal matters. Scans that are not legible, complete, and secure, yet accessible to authorized people when necessary, are not acceptable forms of supporting documentation. If you have any questions about these guidelines, please contact the university records manager, .

The July 2011 issue of the Gen­eral Ledger Newslet­ter, a newslet­ter from the Office of Finance and Trea­sury, high­lights the accounts payable records in Princeton’s cur­rent record reten­tion guide­lines. The inten­tion of this state­ment is to clar­ify the office of record (i.e., who has own­er­ship of and respon­si­bil­ity) for these records. I will cite the main points here, and include addi­tional infor­ma­tion after each point.

• The Office of Finance and Trea­sury is the office of record for pay­ment vouch­ers (e.g., travel vouch­ers, employee vouch­ers, ven­dor vouch­ers, etc.), pur­chase orders, and sup­port­ing mate­ri­als (e.g., invoices, receipts, etc.).

When a request for pay­ment is processed by Accounts Payable, the trans­ac­tion and its sup­port­ing evi­dence are cap­tured in the finan­cial sys­tems in use by Accounts Payable. Accounts Payable then becomes the “office of record” for these records, and assumes the respon­si­bil­ity for main­tain­ing them for the appro­pri­ate reten­tion period. The depart­ment should main­tain the orig­i­nal records for 90 days or until the pay­ment has been ver­i­fied and rec­on­ciled in the depart­men­tal account, whichever is longer.

• This pol­icy does not include the finan­cial records of spon­sored research.

While Accounts Payable also processes pay­ments for spon­sored research projects, we will be treat­ing the finan­cial records of spon­sored research sep­a­rately, pri­mar­ily because of their longer-term reten­tion require­ments. Please con­tinue to main­tain these records as before. The Office of Finance and Trea­sury and I will fol­low up with spe­cific reten­tion infor­ma­tion for these records within the next 6–8 months.

• Finance and Trea­sury will pro­vide depart­ments with copies of pre­vi­ously sub­mit­ted doc­u­ments upon request.

As I men­tioned above, depart­ments should retain orig­i­nal records until they’ve been ver­i­fied and rec­on­ciled. The 90-day period should reduce the need for depart­ments to request copies of those doc­u­ments they have pre­vi­ously sub­mit­ted. In the event that a copy is needed, how­ever, please request it via e-mail: .

• Depart­ments are the office of record for depart­men­tal credit card state­ments and receipts.

Yes, this means what you think it means. Depart­ments must retain the records (monthly credit card state­ments, credit card trans­ac­tion receipts, etc.) that doc­u­ment the use of depart­men­tal credit cards. These records must be retained for 7 years and then destroyed. Please main­tain the records in such a way that you can pro­vide these records if needed.

But wait! There’s more…

• Depart­ments may, if they so choose, scan credit card receipts and other doc­u­men­ta­tion and destroy the orig­i­nals, pro­vided that they scan them to a legally accept­able stan­dard.

We are cur­rently work­ing on doc­u­ment­ing some com­mon­sense scan­ning guide­lines, and they will be pub­lished here, as well as announced in other venues. You may expect these shortly.

Please check here reg­u­larly for more news and infor­ma­tion on all types of records reten­tion top­ics, and feel free to with any questions you might have.

Wel­come to Prince­ton University’s records man­age­ment blog. My name is Anne Marie Phillips, and, as Uni­ver­sity Records Man­ager, my job at Prince­ton is to help you man­age your records and infor­ma­tion in ways that will make your work eas­ier, ensure that you are in com­pli­ance with Princeton’s infor­ma­tion man­age­ment goals and respon­si­bil­i­ties, and iden­tify records that are of per­ma­nent value to Prince­ton that should be trans­ferred to the Uni­ver­sity Archives when they are no longer being actively used in your office. Uni­ver­sity records include paper files, elec­tronic files, e-mail, data­bases, pho­tographs, and more; if it is evi­dence of the work you do, it is a record.

I will use this blog to pro­vide you with news, infor­ma­tion, and help­ful hints that will bring records-related issues to your atten­tion, answer your records man­age­ment ques­tions, and give you ideas and meth­ods for achiev­ing your own records man­age­ment goals.

The types of entries you can expect to find here include:

• Records-related news items (e.g., Ohio State Uni­ver­sity Hacked — Records of 760,000 Com­pro­mised);
• Links to Princeton-specific records infor­ma­tion, includ­ing poli­cies, pro­ce­dures, and records sched­ules (which indi­cate how long you should keep records and what to do with them when they’re no longer needed);
• Dis­cus­sions of spe­cific records issues (e.g., man­ag­ing e-mail, set­ting up a work­able fil­ing sys­tem, etc.); and
• Best prac­tices guides and FAQs.

Please feel free to sub­mit ideas for dis­cus­sion, and to make com­ments and sug­ges­tions. If you need a records con­sul­ta­tion or detailed infor­ma­tion spe­cific to the records in your office, please e-mail me at .