New York City Faces a Daunting Records Management Initiative
NITI JUNKAVEEKOOL / Shutterstock.com
The nation’s largest city hopes to dispose of 700,000 boxes of documents by 2017. But that’s not a simple task.
There are a lot of good reasons why state and local governments should digitize their paper records. Such efforts can boost transparency, cut records retention costs and reduce the physical storage footprint.
Back in November, Route Fifty profiled a records digitization initiative in Tompkins County, New York, where the county did all that, but also created a consolidated records retention service for six municipal governments in the county, which includes Ithaca.
Tompkins County was able to put 200 years worth of meeting minutes—that’s 9,000 boxes—through the imaging process in about two years.
But Tompkins County only has around 100,000 residents. Downstate, New York City has around 8.4 million residents and its massive municipal government has far more records to deal with.
In November, Mayor Bill de Blasio issued an executive order to establish standards for proper electronic records management for municipal agencies through the city’s Department of Records and Information Services. “This transition will promote improved performance and transparency,” the mayor’s directive reads. “It will be one component of a sensible, comprehensive and compliant information governance program.”
Some of the major guiding principles, according to the directive:
a) Ensure the preservation of records having continuing administrative, fiscal, legal and historical or research value; b) Make possible the useful processing of information; c) Reduce records storage, equipment and litigation costs as well as other City resources; d) Improve operations by documenting agency actions and decision; e) Engage all agency staff in uniform record management practices; f) Facilitate access to information in the most efficient manner and at the lowest possible cost; and g) Ensure agencies operate effectively by appropriately disposing of records with no archival and minimal value to the City.
This week, Politico New York took a look at the city’s records digitization efforts, and some of the numbers are simply astounding—but not necessarily surprising considering that New York City is the nation’s most populous municipality and was founded in 1624.
The city is currently scanning “millions of papers that are stashed in dusty boxes in private warehouses throughout the city and in New Jersey” that constitute a collection of 2.8 million boxes that will be disposed of.
Politico New York continues:
Among the 2.8 million boxes, [DORIS Commissioner Pauline] Toole said half are from mayoral agencies and the other half contain records kept by district attorneys and courts. For now, her agency is focusing only on the 1.4 million municipal boxes — determining how to digitize the law-and-order papers is a more complicated task. At the start of the process, the city will simply get rid of boxes containing papers whose required retention periods have passed. As of Dec. 31, Toole's spokeswoman said the agency identified 169,113 boxes eligible for disposal that have been lying around without purpose.
No matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of records. The goal is to get rid of 700,000 boxes of records by 2017, and the city estimates it will save $9 million annually in rental costs for records storage.
Michael Grass is Executive Editor of Government Executive’s Route Fifty.
NEXT STORY: Indiana Transgender Bathroom Penalties Bill Facing Intense Scrutiny