Document Retention Policy
Introduction
document management or document management is the set of technical and practical standards used to manage documents of all types, received and created in an organization, facilitate the retrieval of information from them, determine the time that documents should be kept, eliminate those that are no longer useful and ensure the long-term conservation of the most valuable documents, applying principles of rationalization and economy, always at the auxiliary service of the archival discipline.[1].
The ISO 15489-1:2001 standard defines document management as the efficient and systematic process of controlling the creation, reception, maintenance, use and disposition of documents.[2] Document management is essential to maintain the integrity, accessibility and security of documents in an organization. There are also document management systems (DMS) that function as support for this process.[3].
Document management development
This is an activity almost as old as writing, which was born due to the need to "document" or record administrative acts and legal and commercial transactions in writing to attest to the facts. These types of documents were successively captured on clay tablets, papyrus sheets, parchments and paper, the management of which became increasingly complex as the size of the documentary collections grew.
For centuries, document management in organizations was the exclusive domain of administrators, archivists and librarians, whose basic manual tools were record books, folders, filing cabinets, boxes and shelves in which paper documents (and later audiovisual and documents on magnetic or optical media) are stored, files or cards that allow cross-referencing and a long list of information retrieval techniques through coding and classification systems. More recently, computer scientists have been joining them, who are increasingly necessary due to the complexity and level of sophistication that computer systems support administrative activity are reaching. Although computer scientists substantially benefit document management, information systems professionals are still experts in document flows and the processes of each paper or electronic document.
The use of computers in document management began in practice from the experience of the large English-speaking national libraries, the Library of Congress of the United States of America and the British Library, which in the 1960s created the bibliographic format MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging)[4] or machine-readable cataloging for their databases. A few years later, the use of information and communication technologies became common in public and private administration, with the widespread use of databases and the appearance of word processors and other office applications.