Preparing Records for Transfer

After records have been designated for transfer to the Washington National Records Center (WNRC), you must prepare them for physical shipment to the facility. Preparing the records includes the following steps:

• Sorting Records into Accessions
• Packing Records and Labeling Boxes
• Creating Box Lists

Sorting Records into Accessions

Before the records can be transferred to the WNRC, you must organize them into units called accessions.

All the records in one accession must:

1. originate in the same organization/office;
2. come under a single item in the General Records Schedule (GRS) or NIH Manual Chapter 1743, Keeping and Destroying Records;
3. have the same disposition; AND
4. be eligible for disposition in the same month and year.

Any duplicates, unofficial notes, routing slips, and other non-record material should be removed from the accession and destroyed.

Once you have sorted the records and identified accessions, ask your IC Records Liaison to request one or more accession numbers from the NIH Records Management Officer (RMO). When requesting accession numbers at the end of the fiscal year, determine whether the accession will be physically transferred to the federal records center (FRC) on or before September 30. If not, you must request an accession number for the following year.

The accession number will become the unique identifier for that unit of records. You will need a new number for every accession you create and transfer to the FRC.

The NIH RMO assigns accession numbers sequentially. The accession number will be in the following form: 443-FY-XXXX. The numerical prefix indicates the government agency to which the accession belongs. Therefore, all NIH accession numbers will begin with 443-. The next two numbers correspond with the fiscal year during which the records are transferred. The last set of numbers identifies the IC to which the accession belongs. For example, an accession number for records transferred in FY 2007 might look like this: "443-07-9500."

Example:

Your office has travel files from FY 2004, FY 2005, FY 2006, and FY 2007. On October 1, 2008, you decide that the older files are no longer needed regularly and can be sent to storage.

You determine the records series in 1743 as being 1500-A-2-a, Passenger Reimbursement Files located in the IC travel office. You implement the disposition for 1500-A-2-a which is “Destroy when 6 years old.”

Thus, you ask for an accession number for the FY 2004 records eligible for destruction in October 1, 2010, and an accession number for the FY 2005 records eligible for destruction on October 1, 2011. You decide that the FY 2006 and FY 2007 records will remain in the office where they are readily accessible for use.

Now you are ready to pack the FY 2004 records into one set of boxes and the FY 2005 records into another set of boxes.

National Institutes of Health
Office of Management Assessment | Management Support | Records Management
Last Updated May 16, 2007 | Contact Us