Storage and Maintenance of Records

An archive record is an inactive record that is no longer required to conduct daily business, but requires you to store it until it meets the end of its preservation period. Your records may hold legal, financial, personal, historical, or other important information that must be retained for a short or permanent duration. We are currently in the process of making this process digital. Documents will be stored electronically, as opposed to paper documents. This creates the ability to recycle these documents instead of physically storing them, while still remaining compliant with all guidelines of record retention kept in an electronic system.

State agencies work with the State Archives to develop agency-specific schedules for those records unique to their organization – whether it be paper or digital.

1. The purposes of the schedules are to:

   • Provide agencies with uniform guidelines for the retention and disposition of common administrative, fiscal, and personnel records.
   • Ensure agencies retain these records as long as needed for internal administration, and to meet legal, audit, and other state and federal requirements.
   • Provide agencies with legal authorization to dispose of obsolete records covered by the schedule on a regularly scheduled basis after minimum retention periods have been met.

2. Temporary drafts or personal notes that were not circulated, reviewed, or used to make decisions or complete transactions.

   • Temporary drafts or personal notes that were not circulated, reviewed, or used to make decisions or complete transactions.
   • Extra copies of documents that were created or distributed solely for reference purposes.
   • Temporary files used solely to change arrangement or format of electronic record.
   • Electronic versions of documents, transactions, or reports, when the record is retained on paper or microfilm to provide evidence or for legal or audit purposes.
   • Extra copies of correspondence, reports, and printouts when the record is retained in electronic form to provide evidence or for legal or for audit purposes.
   • • • Copies of files or extracts of databases created solely to transfer data between systems.

Departments must make certain that the retention periods in this schedule Retention and Disposition Schedules | New York State Archives (nysed.gov) are sufficient to meet applicable audit, reporting, or records retention for any programs that are subject to state or federal government audits or oversight. If longer retention periods are needed to meet state or federal requirements, then departments must submit separate records disposition requests for such records. Following this notification, records may be archived and disposed of on a continuing basis, provided the minimum retention period has been met.