Records should be managed at each stage of their lifecycle, from the time that they are created to the time that they cease to hold any administrative, legal, or fiscal value, and are destroyed or are preserved for their historical value. The lifecycle of a record is: creation, maintenance and use, and disposition.

In the first phase, a record is created, received, or captured.

In the second phase, records are maintained and used actively or inactively until retention is met. Records being actively used should be housed in a way that allows for easy access and minimizes loss or physical damage to the materials. Active records are often used by many people and need to be tracked for retrieval purposes. Inactive records are used less than once a month but must be retained for occasional reference or to meet audit or legal obligations; once inactive, records may feasibly be moved outside of the immediate office area or to off-site storage.

The last phase, disposition, arrives when records have met their retention, at which point they must either be destroyed according to schedule or, if they have historical value, be maintained permanently.

Disposition means the act of disposing of records or transferring custody of them to an appropriate repository. Records have a disposition of destroy or of never destroy, which is usually phrased as “transfer to the State Archives,” where they can be preserved permanently.

Access to these records is then handled by the State Archives. Members of the public or of government agencies can access over five million records online at archives.utah.gov. Records not presented online can be accessed via the History Research Center, located at the Rio Grande building in Salt Lake City.

-Kendra Yates