A. Active Record. Active records are typically housed within city offices and are referred to at least several times per year.

B. Disposition. Actions taken with records when they are no longer required to be retained by the agency.

C. Disposition Authority Number (DAN). Control number assigned to records series based on the State of Washington’s Local Government Common Records Retention Schedule and other applicable schedules.

D. Essential Record. Public records that local government agencies must have in order to maintain or resume business continuity following a disaster. The retention requirements for essential records may range from very short-term to archival.

E. Inactive Record. A record accessed infrequently or no longer used in the conduct of current business and is still required to be kept by the retention schedule. Inactive records are often stored off-site and must continue to be safeguarded.

F. Nonessential Records. Public records which are not required in order for an agency to resume its core functions following a disaster.

G. Permanent (Archival) Record. Records which possess enduring legal and/or historic value and must not be destroyed. These records need to be retained and preserved according to archival best practices until such time as they are transferred to Washington State Archives.

H. Record. Any documentation, in any format, that is created, received, or used in the transaction of city business. A record can be stored on any device or in any physical location. For example: paper, correspondence, completed forms, maps/drawings, photographs, recordings, text messages, social media posts, emails, websites, and electronic records.

I. Records Management. The application of legal and best practice management techniques for the creation, use, maintenance, retention, preservation, and disposal of records, for the purposes of reducing costs and improving the efficiency of recordkeeping. The term includes the development of records retention schedules, the management of filing and information retrieval systems, the protection of essential and permanent records, the economical and space-effective storage of inactive records, control over the creation and distribution of forms, reports, and correspondence, and the management of records storage systems.

J. Records Series. A group of records performing a specific function, which is used as unit, filed as a unit, and may be transferred or destroyed as a unit. A records series may consist of a single type of record or a group of records in multiple formats that are filed together to document a specific function.

K. Records Storage System. These systems include physical storage (off-site storage, storage rooms, shelves, desks, office drawers, microfilm, etc.) and electronic media storage (shared drives, software programs that generate records, cloud environments, databases, etc.).

L. Retention Period. The minimum time that records must legally be kept.

M. Retention Schedule. A table setting out requirements adopted by the Washington State Local Records Committee which specifies the retention period, whether the record is designated essential, archival, or potentially archival, and the final disposition of the record.

N. Temporary (Nonarchival) Record. Records which do not possess sufficient historic value to be designated as “Archival”. Agencies must retain these records for the minimum retention period specified by the appropriate, current retention schedule.

O. Transitory Records. Records with minimal retention value. These records were created or received by the agency and are typically of short-term, temporary informational use. (Ord. 2976 § 2 (part), 2019).