Bert Hinkler’s Avro Avian welcomed by crowds in Queen Street, Brisbane 1928, Digital ID 3048
Very much like the crowds welcoming back Bert Hinkler after his solo flight from England to Australia, the General Retention and Disposal Schedule for Administrative Records (GRDS) is welcoming back the Transitory and Short Term Retention and Disposal Schedule (QDAN720).
The Transitory and Short Term Retention and Disposal Schedule was born out of the ephemeral section (section 16) of GRDS version 7. This was expanded in QDAN720 to include other GRDS version 7 record classes which have little or no value to the agency or community and are only required to be kept for a short period of time.
During the GRDS whole-of-government consultation, we received quite a few comments asking if QDAN720 would be included back in the GRDS. So the only fair thing to do was to ask you, our people, what you preferred.
So we sent out a survey in March 2016 asking should QDAN720 be:
- Kept separate to the GRDS
- Be included in the next GRDS release.
With an overwhelming majority of 87%, you voted to include QDAN720 in the next GRDS release.
So when the next version of the GRDS is released, the Transitory section will be added to the end of the schedule and will include even more record classes (based on your feedback on the GRDS consultation schedule).
Some of the new proposed classes are:
- Corporate style
- Infringements
- Reference and lending services
- Space management.
On another note, as you can see for convenience we are still referring to this schedule as the GRDS. We would like to thank all the people who provided feedback on our What’s in a name? blog and we are now considering all of the responses we received.
But what about the GRDS Lite I hear you say? We are currently updating the GRDS Lite in line with the proposed changes to the full GRDS and we are looking for any agencies who have implemented this schedule, either fully or partially. We would like to get your feedback on the revised Lite schedule, so please email us, although please be aware we are working to some tight timeframes so you’ll need to get back to us within a week. .
Stay tuned for more news as we prepare to release the revised schedule in the second half of 2016.
Remember, you can contact us at any time via email, telephone, blog, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Flickr.
Elizabeth Harvey
Appraisal Archivist
p.s. We had the Department of the Premier and Cabinet (DPC) contact us and they have implemented the GRDS Lite v.7.
In November 2015 we implemented the GRDs Lite into our eDRMS and that was as a result of our schedules requiring an update anyway. We have used the numbering configuration provided for in the Lite and also structurally it is mirrored in the system (nested numbering etc.). I was actually taken offline to implement this and its creation in the system (due to an un-importable format) took 3 days alone. DPC will now have to update all of our schedules once again to conform to the new GRDS. It is difficult to justify extra funding for records management in most organisations so ongoing maintenance and currency of retention schedules would be less resource intensive if this can occur.
In terms of the use of the Lite v.7, it has made our life much easier electronically. Applying schedules to the BCS is less time consuming and the broader grouping makes it easier for people with little understanding of retention and disposal schedules to manage records. For the management of physical records we are still occasionally reverting to the full GRDS, especially for records such as RTI requests and responses (5 years is too long to hold these records in their office). This will change though, the more we transition to a paperlite environment.
