In honor of MayDay, this year the G.S.132 blog will be publishing a blog every Wednesday in May regarding essential records and disaster preparedness.
First established by the Society of American Archivists and Heritage Preservation, and now taken on by the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, MayDay is an annual tradition where libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and preservation organizations participate in preparation for potential collections emergencies and disasters. We invite local governments and state agencies to join us in our disaster preparations!
For the first installment of this series, we are going to focus on the basic question of “What is an essential record?” According to the Council of State Archivists (CoSA), essential records are “Records needed for the Continuity of Operations (COOP) of a government agency during and following an emergency.” This amounts to a very small percentage (usually less than 5%) of most agencies’ records. Essential records typically fall into one of five categories:
- Records necessary for emergency response
- Records necessary to resume or continue operations
- Records that protect the health, safety, property, and rights of residents
- Records that would require massive resources to reconstruct
- Records that document communities and families
Unfortunately, this means that there is no master list of all records that should be deemed essential; essential records will differ from agency to agency. Since there is no master list, in today’s blog we will discuss the steps you can take to determine what the essential records are in your office. You can start the process of identifying essential records by identifying the essential functions of your agency.
An essential function, sometimes called a mission-critical function, is something that must continue under all circumstances with minimal disruption. This process can also be completed in cooperation with the people who depend on your agency’s services as well as your mission-critical program and department heads – they can help you to understand which of your services are essential. During these conversations, you can start by asking yourself and your shareholders the below questions:
- What business functions are performed by your agency?
- Are there any statutory or legal requirements?
- Is there anything your agency is responsible for that is critical to the government of which it is part?
- What functions not normally performed by your agency might be required in an emergency?
- Which of these functions are performed only by your agency?
Once you have identified the essential functions of your agency, then you can start examining records and asking yourself and your shareholders the following questions about different record types:
- Does the record speak to the mission-critical functions of the agency?
- What costs (time, money, operational, and human) are associated with the potential loss of the record?
- How soon will the record be needed when an emergency occurs?
- Can you reconstruct the record if it is lost?
This can be done in a formal essential records questionnaire given to agency employees. Please contact your records analyst at the State Archives for an example.
Finally, it is important to note that essential records are based on content, not on format; they can be found in any medium and they can be dynamic (changing) or static (non-changing) records. If you have any questions regarding essential records or disaster preparedness, please contact Kayla Leonard, Essential Records Analyst, at kayla.leonard@dncr.nc.gov.
A version of this post was originally written for the 2023 MayDay Series on the G.S. 132 Files by Kayla Leonard, Essential Records Analyst.
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