This usually means material that is:
- duplicated (such as copies of records securely held elsewhere; reports/minutes circulated among a team for short-term information; copies of official literature)
- unimportant (for example, trivial email messages or paper notes unrelated to council business, compliments slips and stationery)
- of short-term transactional value (such as draft versions of a record, and telephone messages slips after the message has been passed on)
There is no need to keep diaries or notebooks if the information has been transferred into a case management system.
Take time to make a conscious, positive decision about whether to keep or destroy documents. You should normally destroy documents after their retention period, but be ready to make exceptions if necessary. For instance, if a document holds the key evidence of an important decision, you should capture it in a proper record keeping system. Where integrated records are managed in an electronic case management system, they should only be destroyed when all applicable retention periods have expired. This means system user data such as an employee's name and job title may be retained within case records, beyond the retention period of their personnel file. If in doubt, contact the corporate records' manager.
Examples of transient data
In the retention schedules, the disposition code D<1 refers to transient data. The management and administration of records retention schedule defines transient data as "data in transit to a council-approved record keeping system, or transit to final deletion" and requires destruction after transit.
Completion of transit may mean:
- closure of hard copy transient record (for example, notebook, signing-in sheet)
- transfer of information / file into a case management system
- transfer of file into electronic document / record management system
- transfer of file into shared network drive
- alteration of a web page
- final removal of a web page
- expiry of an automated waiting period imposed for disaster recovery, business continuity or data security reasons
In the interests of information security, disaster recovery and business continuity, a short waiting period of up to one year may be observed before deletion of transient data. Some examples:
- 2-week rolling destruction programme on datasets shared by external agencies in the interests of community safety - subjects include: modern slavery, child sexual exploitation, organised crime, prevention of terrorism
- 30-day rolling destruction programme on telephone call recordings handled in a contact centre (telephone recordings may also be retained for training and quality control purposes - see Contact Centre retention schedule)
- 30-day rolling destruction programme on audio recordings of meetings produced to allow for verbatim transcription
- 60 day rolling deletion of web content not modified within previous 12 months
- 30-day rolling destruction of deleted web content in the contents' management system
- 4-month destruction on domestic abuse notifications made to children's services
- 6-month rolling destruction programme on operational data and system backups used in maintenance of ICT infrastructure
- 6-month rolling destruction programme on user-deleted documents in the electronic document and records management system.
- 6-month rolling destruction programme on the personal workspaces of former employees, temporarily held in the electronic document and records management system for review by line managers
- 1 year manual destruction of working documents to do with emergency planning, after their transfer to a final record
- 2-month rolling destruction of interface files used in personnel record keeping, where the source and target systems hold a full record in accordance with the HR retention schedule
- 2-month rolling destruction of interface files used in financial record keeping (excluding adult care and fostering), where the source and target systems hold a full record in accordance with the finance retention schedule