The Library must effectively manage its information and records to ensure corporate compliance (such as financial and asset management, data protection and copyright); to deliver products and services (such as the issues register) to the Customer; and where appropriate maintain organisational/ departmental learning.

Why we maintain records

Every member of staff has the responsibility to save relevant business information, which provides:

• Data to colleagues that will help them understand what has been done or decided. Serving as a recorded reminder later
• Compliance with rules, regulations and legislation appropriate to our organisation such as ‘Confidentiality’ and ‘Copyright’
• Evidence of policy, decisions and/or evidence of actions/activities (Specific examples include minutes of meetings and lessons learned from training activities)
• Evidence needed for an internal or external audit (Specific examples include data to support the delivery of academic courses)
• An institutional memory so that time and distance do not affect access to and availability of the corporate knowledge resource (Specific examples include the staff manual and shared drive archive folder)

We will follow good records management practice to ensure:

• That we can find your information when we need, where we need it
• That the customer and the University are protected by providing auditable evidence of people’s rights and entitlements, having records of what the University did and why it did it
• Costs are reduced particularly time and space costs as:
  • That staff are able to find the information they need quickly
  • That we as a business unit do not keep any more records than we have to
  • That we know when to delete and destroy redundant data, and how to do this safely and securely

Types of data covered by this statement but is not exclusive to include:

• Student personal data and borrowing records
• Staff personal data and borrowing records
• Expenditure processes and correspondence
• Library staff ‘Human Resource’ data
• Asset management processes and correspondence
• Academic and other management board papers
• Capital project plans
• Management information statistics
• Advisory committee, staff meeting minutes and operational papers.