Erin -- 

If you post your request to listserv run by the
Society of American Archivist's Museum Archives
Section you will reach a large number of people who've
developed retention schedules for their museums.  

The address for posting messages is:
[log in to unmask]  Just ask people to reply
to you directly.
 
In the meantime -- many retention schedules have their
basis in state law which means that practice varies
somewhat from state to state.  Beyond compliance with
state law, specific institutional practices are often
developed in consultation with the firm which handles
the annual financial audit and with the attorneys who
handle legal issues for the not-for-profit in question
since these are the keys areas where your institution
needs to make certain it has properly documented its
actions.

Formal records schedules generally relate to areas
where there is some legal liability -- they attempt to
make certain that an organization or corporation keeps
records that attorneys for either side may request in
a discovery process leading up to a trial.    

As to specific museum records -- collections records
are retained permanently, usually in the office where
they are created because they are referred to in the
course of day-to-day business.  Minutes of board
meetings and key committees and museum publications
should be retained permanently because of their
historical value over time.  

General correspondence, public relations materials,
records relating to exhibits, events and activities
need to be decided locally based on a number of
factors.  These factors include your ability to store
quanitities of material and provide adequate care for
it.  You may need to consider setting up an archives
and hiring a professional archivist to manage it,
especially as you transition from paper records to
electronic records.  

Decisions about what to keep and what can be discarded
(a process which archivists call appraisal to the
occasional bafflement of curators and librarians) is a
subjective one.  On the other hand, the retention
schedules I mentioned above are quite objective and
straightforward.  The biggest problem is normally
trying to sort out the files and figure what's fiscal
related, what's personnel related and what is
everything else.  

After getting the basic sorting done, you are making
decisions  based on the short-term usage or
informational value and the longer-term historical and
evidentiary value of the records.  


In larger museums, one of the biggest problems has
been the sheer duplication of documents made possible
by photocopiers and printers. Each dept. head gets
copies of the same committee meetings, the same memos
from administration, the same instructions for
preparing their annual budgets.  A lot of this can be
discarded, assuming someone has the time to go through
it all -- the rule of thumb is to keep the copy from
the office which issued it, not all the copies that
wound up in everybody's files.

Judy Turner
Whitefish Bay, WI


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