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The decision on how long to keep a record and in what medium is one of the most significant information management challenges facing corporations today, according to Robert F. Williams, president of records management consultancy Cohasset Associates.
"The question is one of preserving digital information over time," he says. "I may have to have access to those records forever, but do I need them to be processable forever?"
Although companies like RadioShack and Lockheed Martin Corp. keep records for a decade or more, few American corporations are set up to handle long-term storage of records on anything but paper, Williams says.
But even documents that are stored on tape or paper for 10 years or longer, and which may be accessed only once or twice per decade, should have defined life spans so they can be deleted at some point, according to long-term storage recommendations from research firm Gartner.
Long-term storage may be on paper, microfilm or optical disk platters, and retrieval may take days or weeks.
Gartner recommends that any record stored longer than 10 years should be stored in an "analog, human-readable form" such as paper or microfilm. Why? Those old-fashioned formats are inexpensive, the media are relatively stable, and they avoid problems with compatibility with newer technologies.
Williams says companies maintaining electronic records for the long term without converting them to analog formats have two choices: They can migrate the data from one format to another for the life of the record, which is expensive and could introduce errors, or they can store the records in one format and try to maintain systems that can emulate the equipment and software on which those records were created -- a troublesome problem with a decades-old record.
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