University Archives and Records Management

The CSU Records Retention Schedule also applies to Digital Records regardless of their format. Similar to physical records, electronic records eligible for transfer are those that were created or received by an office or department of the University in transaction of its proper business.

The University Archives Records Management Program will walk you through identifying and stabilizing your holdings.

Digital documents

Nearly all documents are currently created in digital form. Whether to maintain them on paper or in digital form is a basic, but important decision. For those maintained in digital form, standard formats such as the Portable Document Format (PDF) should be used to retain formatting, while separating the documents from the software that created them. The many efforts to capture and preserve the intellectual output of a university in an institutional repository are developing expertise in this area.

Harvested Web content

While the Internet Archive captures snapshots of the Web, institutions may take it upon themselves to do more focused archiving in a more thorough manner. A national library may archive its nation’s Web sites. A university may archive its own domain. Archives might harvest from Web sites related to a particular subject or event. Open-source tools developed by the Internet Archive can be used to crawl and provide access to the content. The data can be kept in the ISO standard WARC (WebARChive) file format.  

Electronic records

This category includes government documents and corporate, institutional, and organizational archives. This type of collection might consist mostly of documents in word processing formats or may include an array of e-mail, databases, spreadsheets, presentations, and other types of files, some of which can only be read using proprietary software. In most cases it’s best to get the content out of proprietary formats. Archivists should be involved in setting policy for their institutions and not just doing clean-up. Fortunately, there are open source tools for ingest and management of electronic records and training is available from the Society of American Archivists and through National Historical Publications and Records Commission funded regional training programs.

Source: OCLC Defining "Born Digital"

Source: OCLC Demystifying Born Digital

The first step to identifying your digital records is to create a robust inventory of your materials. This will help you determine what is viable for transfer and help gauge storage needs.

The next step is to begin the physical and electronic transfer of your digital materials. Because there is no universal campus file sharing system, these guidelines are designed to guide you in transferring your materials despite various storage scenarios.