Disposition of Records

DePaul currently has a contract with R4 Services to provide shredding services for the university.

Records of a confidential or proprietary nature should be shredded. It is important to use the shredding consoles that are provided through R4 Services and not use personal shredders. If a department has a legal hold placed on their records is it easy to verify that destruction has been halted if the records to be shredded are always placed in the approved consoles because there is a record kept of their pick up and shredding. If you have a shredder in the office that you feed the documents into and it shreds as they are fed in, you can not verify that shredding stopped when the hold was placed.

Additionally, it is more efficient to place your records to be shredded into a shredding console instead of standing at your office shredder feeding them one handful at a time. Large and small quantities can be placed into the console and it can be emptied at your convenience.

If your office needs a shredding console, please contact the OGC for more information, including current pricing.

DePaul currently has a contract with R4 Services to provide off-site storage services for the university.

The OGC encourages departments to consider off-site storage when looking for a place to put inactive records until their retention period is over. Off-site storage provides increased security, simple access and tracking, and efficient destruction when necessary. Additionally, using off-site storage frees up space in your offices for more important uses. Off-site storage is easy and surprisingly affordable. R4 Services also provides an online database for use in indexing, tracking, and retrieving all files sent to storage.

If your office needs is interested in the off-site storage, please contact the OGC for more information, including current pricing.

You probably have a file drawer or two (or a file cabinet!) filled with old office files that you produced or inherited over the years. These items may document your department and its function. You might need them to answer questions your boss has. You might take a look and compare them to the records retention schedule, and decide you don't need them any more (or you shouldn’t have them at all). Or you might decide that they are part of the records that provide unique and vital information about your department or office that should be transferred to Archives.

When you transfer those records to University Archives those files become part of the collective history of DePaul and benefit future scholars, researchers and students. The University Archives exists to document the history of DePaul.

Here is a brief list of records that should be transferred to the University Archives:

• Annual or summary reports that document the business and accomplishments of your department
• Publications produced for dissemination by your department
• Minutes of official departmental bodies—that is, meeting minutes of committees or groups that make decisions that impact the functions and future of the department
• Other records listed as needing to be sent to the University Archives on the Records Retention Schedule

For more information on what records should be transferred to the University Archives and how they should be transferred, please visit Transferring Records to the University Archives or contact the University Archives.