The Office of the Chief Records Officer is happy to announce the publication of GRS Transmittal 23 (.pdf). This transmittal makes available five new General Records Schedules:
- GRS 1.1: Financial Management and Reporting Records
- GRS 1.2: Grant and Cooperative Agreement Records
- GRS 3.1: General Technology Management Records
- GRS 3.2: Information System Security Records
- GRS 4.3: Input Records, Output Records, and Electronic Copies
It also includes the “old” General Records Schedules marked up to show superseded and active items as well as guidance and tools to help with implementation.
What is a GRS Transmittal?
A GRS Transmittal is how NARA issues new General Records Schedules. New schedules are not available for use until they are formally transmitted to agencies. Long ago, NARA issued a complete version of the GRS in each transmittal, then we gradually shifted to issuing only new parts of the GRS. As we are now in the process of revising all schedules, we will be issuing a complete new version of the GRS in each transmittal. These transmittals will include both the new schedules as well as the old schedules that still have active items. Not all items on each of the old schedules will be superseded at once due to the way we are revising the GRS.
Guidance and Tools in GRS Transmittal 23
- Crosswalks showing the relationships between both new to old and old to new items.
- Schedule specific FAQs.
- FAQs about the GRS in general as well as the GRS update project.
- An implementation checklist to help walk agencies through the steps of updating their records disposition manuals to match the new GRS.
Things to Keep in Mind
- Agency Records Officers must disseminate the new schedules within their agencies no later than March 2015.
- Use of the new GRS is mandatory and applies retrospectively and day-forward for all described records.
- If your agency intends to use agency-specific schedule items instead of the new General Records Schedules, you must inform GRS_Team@nara.gov within 120 days. You will need to provide the agency-specific schedule and item number as well as the related GRS item.
For more information, please visit the GRS webpage or contact the team at GRS_Team@nara.gov.
Whenever a new records schedule is added for the DOE at my site, it’s my responsibility to put the schedule into our database so that they are searchable. This is very difficult to do from a PDF because some characters aren’t recognizable and there are extra lines to delete, etc. If we retype the text, there is a higher possibility that something will be entered wrong. It would save us a tremendous amount of time if there was a way for us to get a copy of the new schedules in Microsoft Word. Is this an option?
Ms. Martin,
Please contact the GRS Team at GRS_Team@nara.gov and we can send you Word versions of the new schedules. We are also going to be working this week to revise our website to add Word versions of the new schedules as there have been multiple requests.
I would love to see the subject index put back into the GRS. I found this was very helpful, especially when I was new to records management.