Archives New Zealand has now completed the process of assessing feedback on the proposed amendments to the General Disposal Authority 7 (GDA7) and the final document is now available on the records toolkit here and also on Archway as Disposal Authority 576 (DA576). Thank you for the comments received during the public consultation process.
GDA7 was developed for the use of public offices and local authorities wishing to dispose of facilitative, transitory, and/or short-term value public and local authority records legally. Use of the GDA does not require any further authorisation from the Chief Archivist.
GDA7 was amended to:
- remove confusion between sub-classes
- expand the examples of records covered, and excluded (now in a separate column)
- add new sub-classes to cover born digital records created by public offices and local authorities based on Archives New Zealand’s initial experience with born digital transfers.
GDA7 covers generic classes of records of any format that have only short-term transitory value in their immediate and minor facilitation of preparing a more complete public record. They are therefore not required for evidential or legal purposes. These records are created through routine administrative and business processes common to most public offices and local authorities in performing their primary core business functions, duties and responsibilities.
Particular points of interest:
All classes have been amended with more examples and clarification of already existing examples. A new column with excluded record examples has been added to sub-classes.
There has been some confusion about the understanding of duplicates and copies - this has been clarified by combining the original sub-classes 1.4 and 1.5 to create a new sub-class 1.4. copies and duplicates are now covered in one sub-class as below:
1.4 Copies or duplicates of records in the same or different format to the original, that have been created, published or distributed and used for convenience and reference purposes.
The 1.4 sub-class has short term business value only, and is recommended for destruction once the information/material is no longer required or is not actively used or referred to.
A new sub-class 1.5 has been created to cover social media e.g. blogs and tweets, which are created for information or promotional purposes. The sub-class does not cover social media used as a formal business channel.
1.5 Routine Communication of advice or information that is readily available to the public or of low level importance.
A further four sub-classes have been added to cover born digital records that are created by public offices and local authorities in the course of performing their primary core business functions, duties and responsibilities. Archives New Zealand is continuing to investigate processes for managing born digital records.
The sub-classes are:
1.8 Casual or instantaneous communications that contain information of an ephemeral, non-transactional nature
1.9 Non user generated files (system generated files) whichare files not purposefully created by a person but are generated by an operating system
1.10 Zero byte files and empty folders
1.11 Digital source records which areleft behind in an historical database or recordkeeping system after migration.
All of the sub-classes have short term business value only, and are recommended for destruction once the information/material is no longer required or is not actively used or referred to.