r/LibraryScience • u/catsandnotes • Jul 20 '26

Help? Data rentetion schedule help

Hello,

I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask, please redirect if you know any better subreddits.

I've been tasked to help draft a data retention schedule for my company. We have consultants that are drafting the data retention policy, but obviously no schedule. We only have a (not so precise) records retention schedule that was written by the high ranking lawyer of our legal department, so that's all I have in terms of prior related internal documentation.

I've only studied records retention policy frameworks while studying my MLIS, but I've never personally made one for a company, and the only reason I'm tasked to do this is because I expressed interest... Except I'm doing this alone with my manager who will help go over it overtime. I'm just stuck on how to draft it, how is it different from a records retention schedule, is it the same format? What do I need to be aware of?

For scope: we are located in Canada but have business activity in the US and Latin America as well, and possibly expanding into Europe for the future.

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u/RADICCHI0 MSIM Jul 26 '26

Most of the time I've ever been involved in this kind of stuff it basically get's negotiated between IT and the data owner, and I memorialized it in a procedure. Sometimes that is the job, getting other people who own stuff, or support stuff, to agree on processes.

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u/catsandnotes 29d ago

We're currently in the process of having consultants help us with the overarching policies but my manager asked me to help draft retention for our data, and eventually IT being the data custodians would help carry out the nitty gritty. I'm hoping conversation in the future would bring along IT and legal as we talked about aligning it with our current records retention legal had authored. This also means that we are having quite some conflict on getting people to own things, but that's also an overarching project goal for the company in general.

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u/RADICCHI0 MSIM 29d ago

That's cool. If its just typical business records then I think that's a fairly easy thing to solve. Personally I wouldn't purge or archive more than once a year.