General Schedule for Local Records: Annexations

A couple of eagle-eyed readers noticed that we inadvertently left Annexations off of the new General Schedule for Local Records.  Annexations are a legal record created by municipalities, so they belong in the Legal Records standard on the General Schedule. We have updated the General Schedule for Local Records online to include this change.  Agencies…

2019 Update to Records Schedule for Local Health Departments

The 2019 update to the Local Health Departments records retention and disposition schedule has been authorized and is available on our website for access and approval.  To approve the schedule, the director of your county’s health department and the chair of its governing board should sign the schedule on page ii.  Please send a copy…

Title Page to the 2019 General Schedule for Local Government Agencies

2019 General Schedule for Local Records Available

The new General Schedule for Local Government Agencies is officially posted to the State Archives website and is now available for adoption. In order to minimize confusion, we have removed the general records standards from all other local government schedules posted on our website.  Agencies that adopt the General Schedule should follow the General Schedule for all…

How to Adopt the New Local Government Retention Schedules

This post is a follow-up to our January announcement of a new approach to local records schedules in North Carolina. The March 2019 updates to North Carolina Local Government Records Retention Schedules have been signed by the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.  While we’re preparing them for publication and adoption, here’s what you need…

The First Amendment and Social Media

Two recent court rulings have established that governmental social media accounts that are open to the public for discourse are public forums of free expression, like town hall meetings or public parks, and that blocking critical commenters or deleting critical comments violates the First Amendment. Frayda Bluestein discusses these rulings and provides some tips for…

Announcing: Managing Public Records Workshops, Spring 2019

The Government Records Section of the State Archives is pleased to announce dates for the Spring 2019 workshop series on managing public records. This workshop is free and designed for local government employees and elected officials. The workshop will cover*: Public records law Principles of records management Confidential records Record retention and disposition schedules Electronic…

New Retention Schedule Model for North Carolina Local Governments

Since 1960, when the State Archives of North Carolina (SANC) first published a retention schedule for county governments, SANC has updated local government records retention and disposition schedules as records, recordkeeping processes, and the laws governing local agencies have changed. Currently, SANC amends schedules when legal changes necessitate only a few records series to be…

Amendments to the Retention and Disposition Schedule for UNC System Institutions

After consultation with university records officers and other subject matter experts, we made a few amendments to the 2018 records retention and disposition schedule for UNC system institutions.  The amendments have been incorporated into the PDF version of the schedule, which can be found on our website at https://archives.ncdcr.gov/documents/university-north-carolina-general-records-retention-and-disposition-schedule.  The items were renumbered as necessary to…