Today’s public records are also not just traditional records in a digital form. There are new types of digital objects such as wikis, blogs, emails, instant messaging which did not exist in the paper world. If information has value to the FCO, it must be retained. If it does not have value it should be disposed of—unless it is required to meet our legal obligations e.g. tax and financial records.
What is different between keeping paper and keeping electronic information? Over the last 100 years a paper file when it has been opened in an FCO Department, business unit or overseas post, is held for 3 years. In the 4th year, staff in that Department or overseas Posts are expected to review the contents of the paper file and to weed it. In the process, staff dispose of any ephemeral material in the file that has no long-term business value. The file is then sent to the Archives in Hanslope Park where it will traditionally remain for the next 27 years before it is sensitivity-reviewed and transferred to The National Archives at the 30 year mark. When I started working at the FCO in 2005 there were 3 Paper File Collectors employed to collect all the FCO’s paper files in London, by 2007 there were 2 Paper File Collectors and since 2010 there has been just one Paper File Collector. So over the last 8 years there has been a considerable decline in the number of paper files that the FCO is keeping, as increasingly, staff keep only electronic information in electronic files. Our electronic record keeping is the oldest in Government and dates back to 1992 when records were kept on a system called Aramis. At the time the FCO was still keeping large quantities of paper records, and often it was keeping both the hard copy and electronic copy. It was not until 2000 when the FCO moved to a new electronic record system called Registry, that the electronic record started to have primacy. Up until that point many staff regarded the paper copy as the primary record. From 2000 onwards we start to see a steady decline in the number of paper files being kept by staff in London. So over the last 12 years we are now down to steady trickle of paper files finding their way to the FCO’s Archives. However in 2008 we rolled out a new electronic record management system called iRecords. We also migrated all the legacy content from the UK Registry system and all the overseas records which were kept by our staff in our electronic Registries at posts overseas—and the legacy records went into iRecords—which now contains about 11- 12 million records; and last year we migrated the 6 million earlier legacy records from Aramis into iRecords. So the good news is that all our electronic records wherever they were created in the world, are sitting in our electronic records management system – all 17 to 18 million of them!
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