Every office, no matter how small, must have a registry;[40] i.e., must be divided up, qua records, into two branches, administrative and executive; it must have a small branch which keeps and controls, distinct from the large which makes and uses, documents. Registry, the keeper and controller of office papers, is to lay down the way in which letters are to be written and whether copies are to be made. When they are made (or received, if they come from without) all office documents are the property of registry, which is responsible for destruction or preservation (with, of course, the advantage of advice from the executive side in a large office) and for safeguarding and methods of arrangement.
[40] I hope I shall not be accused of ignorance of the fact that registries do exist in some offices. The point is, first, that their existence is not universal; second, that they have not yet been turned towards those functions which it is here suggested they should fulfil.
(3) The golden rule for administrators is: in preserving and arranging documents keep in view a single purpose, that of enabling an ignorant successor by their means to carry on if you and the whole of your staff were blotted out. We depend largely on this rule for an answer to the historian's objection that the administrator if left to himself will destroy all the valuable things—lose the Shakespeare fine, in fact. It is not, however, inserted here for that purpose, but because it is obviously sound.
(4) Apart from this rule the first principle should be economy; and economy, if registry is not to be overburdened with work, must consist largely in rules carefully thought out concerning not the documents which are to be destroyed, but the documents which are never to be made: for example, probably at least 50 per cent. of the copies of out-letters which are preserved in a big office record nothing more than despatch, which could be done in two words or less in a general register.
(5) The ideal subject index, it has been said, would have only one entry and any quantity of cross-references; similarly there is an ideal of a single master series in records: being an ideal, neither of these things is realisable, but it is possible to get near to them. For example, registry can and should have a record of its own, a single general register, and a properly made entry in this would be amply sufficient record of many transactions which are at present dignified with a dossier.
(6) In this connection we may refer to the necessity for the intelligent use of mechanical devices: many duplicates and unnecessary documents are habitually kept owing to a failure to appreciate the merits as distinguishing features of a red pencil and a blue, the opposition of left to right, the possibilities of the first and the second column, not to mention the third, fourth, and fifth....
(7) Registry should have a clear conception of the nature of records—that there are only three kinds: In-letters, out-letters, and memoranda (including accounts). A realisation of this and of the way in which records work into each other means economy in internal arrangement, and in the case of Government offices might, if liaison were close and a single system of record-keeping in general use, make new economies possible as between departments.
(8) So far we have been considering the possibilities of an economy which consists in not making documents; but we have, of course, to consider also actual destruction, of which there are three kinds: (a) First, there is what we may call posthumous destruction, the kind which is now most in vogue, and which we want to stop altogether: that is the destruction which deals with an accumulation formed perhaps years before—destruction for its own sake, because of over-great bulk. Then (b) there is immediate destruction, which gives effect to the judgment passed at the earliest possible moment on a document: you wait only until a letter (let us say perhaps a letter making an appointment) is acknowledged, and then, since its actual terms concern only the person addressed, and for your office's purposes you have sufficient evidence in your registry, you destroy. (c) Finally, there is deferred destruction, the kind which comes into operation where a document, already condemned, so far as concerns the purposes of the office, is temporarily preserved for some purely external reason; for example, in connection with the provisions of the Statute of Limitations.
(9) A primary rule of destruction is that no letter-in, copy of letter-out, or draft of office memoranda shall be kept which does not mean a stage in advance for the office's business. But it is particularly necessary that this destruction should take place at the earliest possible moment, while the business is fresh in the minds of those concerned; because there are documents which, though they have no direct result themselves, yet by that very fact mark an advance in the policy (let us say) of a department, and delay in the consideration of these might conceivably be dangerous.
(10) For the purposes of deferred destruction some system of automatic working will be necessary; for instance, if large masses of papers, valueless otherwise to the office, have to be kept, say, for six years for legal reasons, there should be a regular system by which every day the register of six years back should be examined and the papers there marked (let us say) D.D., for deferred destruction, should be at once drawn, disposed of, and marked off. It is possible that some system might be introduced to cover doubtful cases, which could be given a short lease of life—some statutory number of months, pending a decision by circumstances upon their value. This would be a good safeguard against careless destruction, though that should never occur.