STHC-L: The Science, Technology and Health Care Archives Forum

QUERY: grant administration files

• Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 12:59:47 -0500
• To: sthc-l@library.ucla.edu
• From: Kathryn Baker <kbaker@hms.harvard.edu>
• Subject: QUERY: grant administration files
• Message-ID: 20010213174126.AAA28264@hms1.med.harvard.edu@count61.med.harvard.edu

I'm looking for information about the retention of grant administration
files. 
Thank you in advance for any assistance you may be able to offer.

Our central Sponsored Programs office creates a grant administration file for
every funded research project administered by the school.  Files include the
initial proposal, award letter, narrative and financial reports,
correspondence, memoranda, and related records, such as those documenting
project or funding extensions.

Copies of portions of these files are retained in the Departments that carry
out funded projects.  Departmental project files, and those of the Principal
Investigators are more detailed, and include additional, less formal and more
routine records.  Records management and retention across the departments
varies widely.

Three years after the final close of the project, all legal and administrative
usefulness expires.  I am less clear about the potential secondary usefulness
of the records.  What has been your experience with similar records? What
advice or referrals can you offer?  Some of the potential uses include the
following:


- administrative:   
- With what types of research has the school been involved? 
- What are the school’s most significant accomplishments in research? 
- What has been the school’s involvement in research involving human subjects?
Has it acted responsibly? 
- biographical  
- How did the subject generate and develop an idea over time? What approaches
were employed, with what success? 
- With what projects has the subject been associated? 
- intellectual history?  
- how did this idea develop? How was it expressed and tested?