A few years ago an Editor for a very prominent magazine was asked if they thought they would ever cease hardcopy printing and only publish an online edition. His response was that there would always be a desire for hardcopy as long as there was a Print button. He was half right with this assessment. In today’s world hardcopy magazines are becoming fewer in number but people still print things out to mark up. This isn’t a big deal when you are talking about a magazine article, but it is a nightmare when dealing with your organization’s information assets.

Understanding how to deal with electronic content correctly is key to protecting these assets and, with today’s technology, it is really quite easy to do. The challenge is changing old habits in “the way we’ve always done it!” Before we discuss how to properly work with electronic content lets talk about why we should change our business process. Information Governance is all about protecting and managing an organization’s information assets. Mishandling those assets, unintentional or not, can lead to spoliation. Spoliation “is the action of ruining or destroying something.” In a Court of Law spoliation can lead to a judgement going against you.

An example of spoliation I would wager occurs on a daily basis is someone moving an electronic file, an email for example, they have determined is a record in some matter to a central folder for safekeeping by dragging and dropping it. The issue? Dragging and dropping a file changes the underlying metadata of that file from the original state. There is metadata hidden within the file (such as the date created, author, etc.) that must be maintained in a secure, non-alterable state for a Record to be accepted in a legal sense as evidence. The short answer to this is stop doing that. The long answer is contact your technology department to move the file for you if your software doesn’t handle this process or upgrade your software so that it will.

Another practice that I regularly encounter is a file that is printed out so that someone can mark it up with revisions. In many organizations these markups are Records just as like the final product, so these drafts tend to accumulate in a folder or a box which is scanned at the end of the development process to create a massive image that is then saved as the Record file. This may not necessarily lead to spoliation, but it is certainly a waste of resources. Printing, marking up, saving, sorting, scanning and saving all of these things takes time (money) that could easily be avoided by revising the file directly in the software platform it resides in.  This saves time (money) and supports collaboration within the organization. In addition, the software handles the metadata issue to mitigate the risk of spoliation. The challenge is to get the staff used to working within the software. This can be a difficult transition, especially for those individuals that are more tactile, but the results are well worth the time to train them in the new process.