Step Four: Continuing Maintenance
The best records management program will quickly fall into obsolescence if the office does not make efforts to stay current. Records, particularly government records, grow at an astronomical rate. If you do not take steps regularly to move inactive records to other storage and destroy temporary records when they become eligible for destruction, they soon will fill up your filing equipment, then your office, and bring clutter and disorganization to all operations. Consider implementing an annual “records clean-up day” to reassess the records of the office and identify what can be moved or destroyed. Select a time that is not in the middle of your busy season (perhaps around the holidays), and designate a day for everyone to identify records that can be destroyed, and collect them. Remember, also, that having an appointed records management officer who can designate part of his or her time year round to keeping the office files current will go a long way toward ensuring that your records management program succeeds.