About the Records and Information Management Division

The Records and Information Management Division is responsible for storing, accessing, microfilming, scanning, preserving, and disposing of public documents generated by state and local governments. Thus, the division plays a vital role in preserving essential information and helping to ensure continuity and accountability in government.

To this end, the division maintains the State Records Center, a vast warehouse that currently holds about 110 million government documents in about 44,000 cardboard boxes-enough pieces of paper that, if laid end to end, they would make a paper trail 19,000 miles long!

State law requires state agencies and local governments to preserve various kinds of public records for varying lengths of time, according to official state and local government retention schedules. Each agency is responsible for notifying the records center when documents are eligible for disposal. A State Records Committee and a Local Government Records Committee must approve all disposal requests.

Humanizing the Records and Information Management Division

Many exciting advances are happening as we take seriously the Secretary of State’s stewardship for agency records and information management aspects. We recently began bar coding boxes stored in the RMD Records Center. This helps our staff and your agency track the inventory of records, their location, retention and disposal events, plus check-out and return activity. The goal has been to streamline the management of records as they meet the later stages of their lifecycle (storage/disposal/archiving).

Training opportunities are also being offered to help agencies meet the requirements of MCA 2-6-213. Practicing records management processes, such as retention scheduling provides cost savings and legal protection. For instance, when following systematic cycles for records disposal, agencies save money in storage costs, facility space and resource time. When an agency can easily track what they have vs. what they’ve disposed, time and money are saved researching and discovering records.

As we move forward, the Records and Information Management Division is also updating the State’s General Retention Schedules. Currently under revision are the Payroll/Personnel General Schedule 5 and the Licensing Schedule 8. The intent is to make sure we’re accommodating current business processes and functions, providing retention guidelines to agencies that generate or are responsible for these official records. Be watching for future updates to other schedules as well.