CDIA Records Management 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is 'appraisal' in the context of archival and records management practice?
- Determining the monetary value of physical records for insurance purposes
- Evaluating records to determine their retention value and ultimate disposition (Correct answer)
- Auditing a records management system for compliance with regulations
- Appraising vendor proposals for records management software
Correct answer: Evaluating records to determine their retention value and ultimate disposition
Appraisal is the process of evaluating records to determine which should be retained permanently, retained for a defined period, or destroyed based on their administrative, legal, fiscal, or historical value.
Question 2: A CDIA candidate is designing an imaging system for a county government. Which records management requirement is unique to government agencies compared to private sector organizations?
- Government agencies are exempt from retention schedules
- Government records are often subject to public access laws such as FOIA or state open records acts (Correct answer)
- Government agencies may destroy records without any disposition authority
- Government records do not require metadata for legal admissibility
Correct answer: Government records are often subject to public access laws such as FOIA or state open records acts
Government records are typically subject to public access laws like the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or state open records acts, imposing transparency and access obligations not applicable to private sector organizations.
Question 3: In a records management program, what is 'accession' most accurately defined as?
- The process of adding security classification labels to newly created records
- The transfer of physical or legal custody of records from one organization or system to another (Correct answer)
- Indexing records into a database for rapid retrieval
- Copying records to a backup storage medium for disaster recovery
Correct answer: The transfer of physical or legal custody of records from one organization or system to another
Accession refers to the formal transfer of records — including physical custody or legal responsibility — typically from an originating office to an archives or records center.
Question 4: Which of the following is an example of a 'non-record' that would typically be excluded from formal retention scheduling?
- Signed contracts with vendors
- Preliminary drafts not retained as evidence of agency decision-making (Correct answer)
- Audit reports reviewed by senior management
- Financial statements submitted to regulators
Correct answer: Preliminary drafts not retained as evidence of agency decision-making
Preliminary drafts that are not kept as evidence of the decision-making process are typically classified as non-records and are excluded from formal retention schedules.
Question 5: What is the primary risk of 'format obsolescence' in long-term digital records preservation?
- Digital records become too large to store on modern hardware
- Software or hardware needed to read the record format may no longer be available (Correct answer)
- Digital watermarks degrade over time making records undetectable as authentic
- Records stored digitally are more susceptible to physical damage than paper
Correct answer: Software or hardware needed to read the record format may no longer be available
Format obsolescence occurs when the hardware or software needed to render a digital format is no longer available, making records unreadable even though the data still exists.
Question 6: Which records management concept ensures that when a department is reorganized, records created under the old structure can still be linked to the functions that created them?
- Geographic filing
- Provenance (respect des fonds) (Correct answer)
- Alpha-numeric indexing
- Active records rotation
Correct answer: Provenance (respect des fonds)
Provenance (respect des fonds) is the archival principle that records should be maintained according to the organization that created them, preserving their original context even through restructuring.
Question 7: A court finds that an organization intentionally destroyed records relevant to a lawsuit after a litigation hold was issued. What legal consequence is most likely?
- The organization receives a tax penalty for improper records disposal
- The court may impose sanctions including adverse inference instructions against the organization (Correct answer)
- The organization is required to recreate destroyed records from backup
- The opposing party must prove the destroyed records were harmful before sanctions apply
Correct answer: The court may impose sanctions including adverse inference instructions against the organization
Intentional destruction of records under a litigation hold constitutes spoliation, and courts can impose sanctions including adverse inference instructions — telling the jury to assume the destroyed records were unfavorable to the destroying party.
CDIA Records Management 5
What is 'appraisal' in the context of archival and records management practice?