[IARA - County/Local Records Custodians] Monthly Bulletin, May 2024

Data is defined by ARMA International as, “symbols or characters that represent raw facts or figures and form the basis of information.” Data must be organized in order to be usable. Raw data on its own is devoid of context and has no meaning.  

Records 

As you may have heard us say many times, records are any recorded information, regardless of medium or format. Public records are any recorded information, regardless of medium or format, created in the course of government business and which belong to the public.  

Data and Records Management 

Managing data from a records management perspective can seem daunting at first. Many times, the first instinct is to save an entire database forever, or to want to transfer the entire contents of a database to the State Archives. However, if you look at data as the building blocks that create records, it becomes much simpler.  

When we look at data as building blocks, there are essentially three questions we need to ask ourselves: 

1. How long will this data be needed for business use? 
2. Does the data fall under a record series on a retention schedule your office or agency follows? 
3. Is there historic value to the data?  

Some common business uses of data are reporting, decision making, program development, KPI reporting, APRA requests, and information or research requests. If you determine, for example, that you will need to build reports from your database for as long as your office exists then you will want to plan to manage your database permanently. While you may not need to maintain all of the data within the database permanently, you will want to ensure that you can always access the data you do need in the format in which you need it. 

To determine if data may fall under a record series, check all retention schedules that your office follows. This may include your office specific schedule and/or the County/Local General Retention Schedule. If you find that the data your office creates does fall under a record series, but the retention period or description are not accurate because of changes to how you are generating or using the data, please reach out to cty@iara.in.gov! 

Not all data, or databases, are historically significant. Some data may not need to be retained permanently, while some data may contain what we refer to as a “historic sub-set" that should be retained permanently. Some data may be historically significant, but may also be aggregated at the State level which can affect your responsibilities. For example, marriage data is reported by County Clerks to the State’s aggregated database which is called INcite and is managed and maintained by the Indiana Supreme Court. In this example, the Indiana Supreme Court has responsibility for the aggregated data they maintain for all 92 counties, and County Clerks have responsibility for any data or records that fall under record series CL 13-01: Marriage Records.  

We hope this brief dive into data and records was helpful. If you have questions about how data and records intersect, please don’t hesitate to reach out: cty@iara.in.gov.