Records Management and Content Analysis

Posted on March 28, 2010 by admin

There are a few steps that every company needs to take care of in order to maintain good records management. The first step and the most important step before filing your records is content analysis. Content analysis describes and categorizes content in the enterprise that may become records, provides source locations, and describes how the content will move to the records management application.

Content analysis use

Content of your records first needs to be analyzed in order to file those records into appropriate sections. Ole Holsti has created 15 groups of uses for content analysis and they show their purpose in general, what questions they need to answer as well as to which element of communication archetype they apply.

The first use has a purpose of making inferences about the progenitor of communications. It is intended to figure out who is the source, and its use is to answer the question of possible disputed authorship. Once that has moved out of the way the question is why? The answers and uses are:

  • Secure military and political intelligence
  • Analyze character of individuals
  • Infer cultural aspects and change
  • Provide both legal and evaluative evidence

The second purpose is describing and making assumptions about the aspects of communications. The questions asked are how, what and to whom. The answers are:

How?

  • Analyze persuasion techniques
  • Analyze style

What:

  • Describing communication content trends
  • Make a connection between familiar characteristics of given sources into messages produced by them
  • Compare content of communication with standards

To whom:

  • Connect familiar audience characteristics into produced messages
  • Describe communication patterns

The last purpose is to interpret the communication consequences. The question is to what effect?

The answer:

  • Measuring the readability
  • Analyzing the information flow
  • Assess communication responses

Although all of this sound quite complicated it is a necessary part of records management. Until you get over this part there is no real records management. As far as the real process of records management with content analysis goes there are six questions that need to be answered in every aspect of content analysis:

  • What data should be analyzed?
  • How is the data defined?
  • From which population are they drawn?
  • What is the connection between the context and the analyzed data?
  • What are the analysis boundaries?
  • What is the deduction target?

The basic concept and of analysis is frequency. Basically the density of some words, similar to keyword density in search engine optimization, is important and they may reflect significant concerns related to communication. So the content analysis begins with counting of words and frequency of keywords, but it extends even beyond that. Homonyms and synonyms are also used to analyze the content of a document.

Next step of content analysis is divided into dictionary based or quantitative and qualitative approach. Dictionary based approach is used to set up a list of categories that are retrieved from the list of frequently repeated words and phrases. They also control the distribution of those words throughout the text. That method is used to transform the observations found into statistical data.

Qualitative content analysis is used for strict implications and intentions of the text. The qualitative analysis allows you to classify the data and order it in groups rather than statistics.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Content Analysis

Advantages:

  • Looking directly at the communication using transcripts or texts, and in that way it obtains the direct view of the social interaction
  • It allows qualitative and quantitative operations
  • Analysis of the text will provide you with very valuable cultural and historical insights over a certain period of time
  • It will allow you a close relation to the text that can go from specific categories to relationships, it can also statistically analyze a text in coded form
  • You can use it to interpret a text for any other purpose like the development of specialized expert systems
  • It is an inconspicuous way to analyze interactions
  • It will also provide you with an insight into the complex models of language use and human thoughts
  • If done properly it is the perfect research method

Disadvantages:

It can be time consuming

  • There is a big room for error, especially when analysis of relations is used in order to attain a larger level of facts interpreted
  • Sometimes it lacks a theoretical side and it may focus on meaningless issues
  • One of the biggest disadvantages is reductions over time, especially if you are working with a hard and complex transcript
  • It relies too much on word count
  • It can sometimes overlook the context that makes the text

Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of records management you should be aware that all of this is rarely done by people. Nowadays we have different types of software for that, they will save you time and money. Besides that the margin for error is much lower than when it is performed by a human.

The key points of content analysis and the importance of using content analysis in records management.

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Discovery

Posted on March 28, 2010 by admin

Every now and then some of the records you keep or even active documents may fall under some court case. If that happens you will have to go through several phases of discovery, but that will be out of your hands. Discovery is a process that is usually ordered by courts. It relates to the hold orders issued and it involves searching through the company documents, whether they are classified as records or not makes no difference. Their job is to find and identify documents that match the discovery and hold order issued.

When you need to remove a document due to attorney-client privilege or due to some other restriction you need to follow the negotiation on both sides of the legal issue. When the search is complete the documents must become records if they are not already and they need to be placed under a hold. In some cases they will be copied and transferred to the opposing council for reference.

So whenever a court or some other authority orders a company to go through a discovery process they need to search all of their documents and find the matching ones. They are placed on hold or suspension so that the normal procedures of retention schedule wouldn’t affect them. The company or organization that is performing the discovery must ensure that the original context of those documents is not altered, meaning that those documents need to be delivered in their original form. Performing spoliation under those conditions would mean breaking the law.

To better understand the process of discovery you need to understand what hold and spoliation are. Hold is a simple legal process that ensures that the documents in question are not destroyed as a part of the retaining schedule. Hold ensures that they are kept away from their destruction date, which remains until the hold is lifted. When the court case is over if there is no need for those documents anymore the hold will be lifted, but sometimes the documents may be copied and archived by the court for future reference.

With that being said it is understandable why spoliation is forbidden. Spoliation is deliberate destroying or altering the content of the documents in question. The team or organization that is performing the discovery must ensure that they do not alter the content of the document.
If you happen to find yourself in a process of discovery either by court order or a government investigation you will go through three legal hold processes:

  1. Hold notification
  2. Segregated repository for ESI
  3. Ongoing preservation obligation
  4. Hold Notification

When a discovery order is issued the legal hold begins. The first phase is hold notification. Hold notification involves informing the custodian of the records in question either by the company or by legal means from the court or authority that ordered the discovery. The notification that the custodian receives is not just a receipt telling that he received the order. This notification allows custodian responses and it will also provide reporting and real time following on those responses from the custodian.

Isolated ESI Repository

ESI stands for “Electronically stored information”. Unlike with physical records, electronic records are harder to find and cross-reference, they are easier to modify. They are also harder to identify, the system used needs to have a very accurate approach that at the same time enables electronic and archived communication. That includes e-mails, web transactions, metadata and communication from manual devices. All of them need to be sorted according to relevance. ESI have a greater risk of being altered or deleted so they should be kept in an isolated repository.

Ongoing Preservation Obligation

Ongoing preservation obligation is not actually a phase nor a process but rather an obligation given to the company by the authorities. It states that once a company is presented with a notice of a lawsuit all further electronic communication will also fall under the legal hold. So it is a warning stating to watch their future communication.

In order to fully understand what a legal hold is the definition says it clearly: “Legal hold starts with a notice or any form of communication coming from the legal counsel that is directed to a company which at that point puts a stop to processing or disposition of the records, that includes tape recycling, any form of archived media or other form of storage and documents management and information. Legal hold shall be issued as an outcome of an anticipated litigation, lawsuit, government investigation, audit or any other similar matter on order to avoid possible spoliation of evidence. A legal hold may encompass procedures that affect active data, even recycling of backup tapes”

One thing to keep in mind is that more and more organizations are using electronic records rather than physical records. Electronic records can be modified and destroyed much easier and sometimes it is hard to even prove the existence of an electronic record. So in case you receive a discovery order a smart thing to do would be to keep a physical record backup and a physical file plan.

The article describes in length what a discovery is, the effects of it and the effects of legal hold as an important step in records management discovery.

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Records Management

Posted on March 25, 2010 by admin

Record is defined as a document either in physical or electronic form found in a company or organization that serves as a proof of particular activity, such as transaction, performed by the company/organization. Records management is a modern practice of keeping and maintaining the records of a company from the time of creation up to the disposition or archival preservation. A record can be in any form such as a birth certificate, office document, database, application data, e-mail and other electronic forms. Records management is a process that follows and maintains various forms of evidence and activities of a certain organization, usually applied according to the records value.

 The records management procedure has a few basic points:

  • Determining the type of information that is to be considered as records
  • Handling of the documents that will become records
  • How those documents should be collected once they become records
  • How and how long should a certain record be held in order to meet the required business, legal and regulatory standards
  • And in the end, disposal of expired records or eventual location, protection and archiving of those records. Archiving is done for important documents that can be used in the future as a reference or in external events like lawsuits.

The first point is determining which documents are to be considered as records. This is the responsibility of records managers and lawyers. Careful categorization of those documents will ensure that the proper documents are held for a needed amount of time. A good and neatly designed records management  system will help the organization legally. It will also help that organization to demonstrate the following of mandatory obligations, and in the end it will increase the efficiency of the organization by disposing and destroying of the documents that are not needed and not considered as records.

Path of Records Management

Companies that are in a need of this kind of a system should have a file plan that will organize all the records with their existing retentive schedule by hierarchy. To turn a certain document into a record, you must first acknowledge it as a record and then classify it by putting it into the file plan.

When that document turns into a record, it will go through a “life cycle” that has one or several phases. Throughout the life cycle, period of how long the records are being held in a certain phase is determined and controlled by a retention rule. When the records life cycle ends, the record will be destroyed or archived. There are a few ways to dispose a record such as accession, destroy and review. When it comes to disposition, it usually doesn’t happen automatically. It has to go through a process called records scheduling.

To understand what has just been said, here are the explanations of the terms used which are necessary for records management:

  • File plan is used to classify the records. Usually storage is made where records are placed in hierarchical order, either by years or alphabet. File plan may also be used for security purposes and according to the security rules the records may be placed separately from the rest of the records.
  • Declaration and classification go hand in hand with each other. Declaration is used to pronounce a certain document as a record and classification is used to file that record in a certain place of the file plan.
  • Life Cycle of a record is the time from declaring a document to be a record to the time it is destroyed. There may be one or several phases in a records life cycle. Retention schedule is used to determine how long a certain record will stay in a phase and how long it will take to pass on to the next phase. The last step in records management is disposition. Disposition can be performed in three different ways: Accession, Destroy and Review
  • Accession involves deleting the records from a database. Before the deletion however, the records are transferred to some other authority that from there on takes the ownership and responsibility for the records.
  • Destroy is self explanatory, the records are destroyed permanently. Physical records are burned or shredded and electronic records are overwritten.
  • Review is a process where the staff members review the document that has expired and eventually prolong the lifespan of the record.
  • Discovery of records is a special process where usually court orders the search through the records and finds the records that match the discovery and hold order.
  • Hold is a process where the records are legally protected and cannot be destroyed like they would be once their life cycle expires.

Importance of Records Management

The importance of records management should be clear by now. Records management is used to achieve efficient, transparent and accountable governance. The proper use of records management will help you access the required information more easily since all the records will be easily accessible. The proper flow of information makes it easier for a company to work efficiently. Simple removing of a duplicate document will speed up the work and efficiency. And in the end, destroying of the documents allows the use of only needed records and prevents theft and damage to important records.

Records management has a great purpose and importance for any company or organization and by knowing all of its important aspects you will be able to make the best out of it.

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