A challenge faced at the organisation I work at is what to do with all the legacy files on apprentices which still must kept in paper form. Although parts of the file are scanned for multi-site access, the external funding body who audit these files request that the originals are maintained.
So at what point does the organisation archive these files.
Clearly they should be held locally for as long as they are active and needed for current administrative use.
This was where I found the records lifecycle useful as a basis for decision making and establishing where such files become semi-active and inactive. In this context, the point where an apprentice achieves their qualification is the closure point - this is the time to archive.
The chart above I drew up based upon this concept shows that the amount of use a record gets varies over time. The initial stages of life it gets a lot of "attention" then this drops off, followed by a small spike later on when it is recalled (perhaps for an audit or check later on).
The next challenge, whether to use in-house facilities at another site or to use third party.
