Fall semester is approaching rapidly, and with full campus resumption an expectation, now is a good time to catch up on your Records Management housekeeping! The return of students, faculty and staff to campus will make for a full office, and you’ll want to declutter your physical records space as much as possible before then. Is there a filing cabinet that no one has cleaned out in recent memory? Are there semi-active records stacking up in a forgotten corner of the office? Do you need somewhere to store your physical records until they fulfill their retention?

We here in the Okanagan Records Management Program know how much space physical records can take up, which is why we offer vaulted records storage space for campus units, free of charge. Under the Library’s custodianship, your physical records will be transported into our secure storage vault by Central Receiving and Mail. Once they have entered into the Records Management Program, their retention and disposition will be tracked in our database. We will even oversee their confidential destruction when their retention period is over, with permission from your head of unit, of course.

Not sure if the records you have need to be kept any longer? Records Manager Michael Stewart can advise you on matters of records classification, retention, and disposition (m.stewart@ubc.ca). Ready to unload some records boxes into our storage program? Records Management Assistant Stephanie Plumb can help you open a storage account, finalize your box list and labels, and coordinate a box pick-up and delivery (stephanie.plumb@ubc.ca).

Visit the Records Storage Program page on our website to learn more. For Records Management instructional documents, please visit the Policies, Guidelines, Best Practices and Standards page on the UBC Records Management website. For information about what to keep and what to get rid of, check out the official UBC Records retention schedules.