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 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better sports nut! Let your teams follow you with Yahoo Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/sports;_ylt=At9_qDKvtAbMuh1G1SQtBI7ntAcJ ========================================================= Important Subscriber Information: The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes). If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).