The retention schedule is a document describing all the archives of a producer or holder of public archives and which lists the following information for each category of archives: type, title or description of the content, administrative retention period and final disposition.
The retention schedule is designed independently of the storage medium of the documents it mentions: the rules must therefore be applied in the same way to digital and physical documents.
Article 2§2 of the Law of 17 August 2018 on archiving states that the archives of public institutions are public archives, and that these institutions are required by Article 6§1 to establish a sorting table for their archives, even though LIST has a special status and is treated as an organisation falling under Article 4§2, known as "derogatory regimes" of the law on archives.
The final "retention" status therefore implies that LIST is responsible for the permanent retention of the archives.
The development of a retention schedule serves three purposes:
The structure of the retention schedule is based on a generic framework that is similar for all public entities subject to the general regime, which can be adapted according to the missions, activities and size of the organisation. This generic framework is based on a customisation of the Arcateg reference system and method, created by Marie-Anne CHABIN (commercial reuse of the name of the method is subject to intellectual property rights).
This generic framework is developed in three levels of depth:
The method defines 20 fields of activity, coded by a letter (from A to T). The generic fields are grouped into three activity groups:
Unused areas of activity from the generic framework do not appear in the retention schedule .
Each area of activity is subdivided into retention categories. The categories are defined by cross-referencing a context (area of activity) with a retention risk over time (short, medium, long, very long term).
A documentary series consists of any homogeneous set of documents within a category from a management perspective.
There are generally two main types of series:
Series are numbered within the category in the order in which they were created, and this number has no meaning, unlike the category code.
This is constructed by concatenating the category code and the series code, thus forming a unique identifier for the series. The usefulness of this code lies in its use as metadata for document lifecycle management. It is linked to the retention parameters, which are the administrative retention period, the trigger and the final disposition.
See description above for "document series".
This field is used to detail the different types of documents or data that characterise the series: correspondence, minutes, reports, photographs, etc.
In some series, the types are very detailed so that the user can understand the content of the series without ambiguity.
The administrative retention period (ARP) is the legal or practical period during which archives are likely to be used by the producer or holder, at the end of which a decision is made regarding their final disposition.
The administrative retention period indicates, in years, the length of time during which documents belonging to a particular series must be kept. By default, the ARP is calculated from the date of creation of the document. When documents are organised into a logical set in the form of a file, for reasons of consistency and practicality, all the documents in the file should be transferred at once when the file is closed.
From then on, the ARP runs from the closure of the file, i.e. from the addition of the last document constituting the file.
The trigger is an event from which the retention period countdown must be launched. If this column is not filled in, it means that the ARP applies from the date the document was created. Otherwise, the ARP applies according to the information provided.
Two possible provisions:
If a series has been placed in historical storage, marked with the letter (C), this implies that the documents identified therein have heritage value and historical interest that contribute to the company's memory. It is therefore important to preserve them for future generations (particularly researchers).
This disposition only applies after the ARP has expired, i.e. the period during which the document retains its binding value for the company.
Historical preservation does not mean that documents and data are immediately accessible. There is a legal obligation to draw up an inventory of the archives before they are placed in historical preservation (regardless of their medium). During the inventory process, the disclosure periods are established on the basis of the data contained in the archives (copyright, sensitive data: personal data, sensitive data: documents relating to tax secrecy, etc.). The various disclosure periods are set out in Article 16 of the Law of the 17 August 2018 on archiving.