 Hi everyone, welcome back. I'm DJ, the Data Maintenance Manager. Now that you have a basic understanding of what university records are, let's take a look at one particular records type that we all know well, email. In this module, you will learn best practices when managing email. By the end of this training, you should be able to, one, explain the relationship between your email and your broader record-keeping responsibilities, two, recognize why email silos are risky for the university, three, recognize the different types of email and how to manage them. First things first, when conducting university business via email, employees must use UBC provided accounts. Don't use Gmail or Hotmail or other non-UBC-approved email providers. Got it? Good. Now, let's get started. Email is a persistent and an important part of conducting business at UBC. We all get plenty of email each and every day. Even the Data Maintenance Manager gets too much email, from fans mostly, and the paparazzi. We can't let email pile up in our inbox. Some of the email we get are university records and those need to be managed centrally. Why you ask? Why manage email at all? What is wrong with letting them pile up in our inbox? Then I can just archive them, right? Well, there are several good reasons. First, when staff retain email in a personal silo, no one besides them has access. When they leave a retire, important email may be lost or destroyed. When email documents a decision at the university, it should be available to other staff as part of a central file for the department and not left in a personal silo where others cannot get access to the content. Silo's blocked collaboration and university efficiency and email silo's severely impact information integrity. All the information about a particular subject or activity should be in one place, not fragmented across information systems. Furthermore, by using personal email silos, there is always the potential of information lost when folks undertake a cleaning frenzy. Silo's are for grain, not business records. Email, like all university records, needs to be retained and destroyed centrally, according to a retention schedule as discussed in our very first lesson. Remember, university records, even if they are in the form of an email addressed to you, do not belong to you personally. Retaining a personal email silo is risky to the university as well. What? How can retaining email that is CWL password protected be a risk to the university? The risk comes from the way we share information in email. When I have an email that others need to access, I usually forward it to whomever I like. Access to the content of the email is controlled by me alone. This isn't a good approach. I could add anyone I like or I could make an error in the email address and send it to the wrong person. It is an easy mistake to make and it could lead to a serious privacy breach. Access to the content of a university business record should be controlled and not done ad hoc or according to personal preference. As the sender of the email, I am also causing that record to be duplicated to everyone I forward it to. And you know what? Each time that email is forwarded, the risk increases. All the folks I forward the email to can forward it to whomever they want, and so on and so forth. You see the problem? This is uncontrolled duplication all over the university. Folks don't know who should be retaining the email centrally as a record and who should not. In the siloed approach, the email record is never retained and destroyed centrally according to a schedule, but instead duplicated all over the university. Access is uncontrolled. Ugh, this email business keeps the data maintenance manager up at night. What can we do to reduce the risk? The best way to manage email is to familiarize yourself with the four types of email. I bet you never thought there were different types of email. There are. One, university business records. Two, duplicates. Three, short-term reference. Four, transitory and spam email. Let's take a closer look at those categories using a couple of examples. I have just sent an email to my boss asking me to have an expenditure approved. This email is a university business record because it documents a business request and should be retained centrally. Later that week, I received a response from my boss approving the expenditure. This should also be stored centrally because it documents an action that my boss has taken in spending the university's money. I sent another email that outlines the plan for a project that I'm participating in. This is also an example of a record that I should store centrally in the project file because it begins to tell the story of the project and it demonstrates the business of the university. University business records are those records including email that demonstrate or support the decision-making process of the university. They should be stored centrally and managed according to a retention schedule. In my initial email to my boss where I asked for approval of an expenditure, I also cc'd my colleagues. They were cc'd for information only. They do not need to file the email centrally and they can delete the email as soon as they're finished with it. Should my colleagues need to refer to the contents of the email, they can find the record centrally along with everything else that has happened since it was filed. The cc'd email is referred to as a duplicate. In the last email I sent outlining the plan for the project, I included a team member responsible for the budget. They required my original email while developing a draft budget for the project. Once the budget was complete, they no longer required my original email in their inbox. This is an example of an email that is required for short-term reference needed in the development of another document, in this case the draft budget. Transitory emails are the easiest to identify. Transitory emails are the mass emails sent from a listserv. They are also personal emails from colleagues inviting you for coffee. They are the back and forth when setting up a meeting. They do not need to be retained and should be removed as soon as possible. Now that you are familiar with the different types of email, here are some tips on how to manage email. As long as there are no active, legal, or FIPA requests, you should 1. Delete transitory email regularly at the end of each day. 2. Delete short-term reference email weekly or when you no longer require the information. 3. File university business records centrally immediately and delete from your inbox or sent items. Be sure the central location has appropriate security. 4. If you have to share information in the form of an attachment, remember it is always better to file the attachment document in a central location than add a link to the location in the email. The Data Maintenance Manager uses a UBC-approved platform like Workspace or SharePoint for sharing both inside and outside of the university. If I make a mistake on the email address, the login requirements of the platform offers an additional layer of security and I am not clogging up everyone's inbox with attachments. A privacy breach can easily be avoided using this method. You can start reducing your email overload right now by removing transitory email from your inbox. But managing email should be part of a broader, documented records management strategy for your entire unit. The Records Management Office at the University Archives is available to help you design a strategy for managing university records within your unit. Check the resource section of this course for contact information. In this module we covered 1. The importance of managing emails centrally as a university record. 2. Why email silos are bad for business and risky to the university. 3. Types of email and how to manage them. It's quiz time, but first make sure to read the section on types of email and how to manage them in the Tips for Managing Email document located in the resource section of this course as it will be on the quiz.