MCC Daily Tribune
For The Record: Out-Cards are Awesome!
Picture this:
It’s late morning and the mail will be swinging by any minute. Things have been quiet all morning…too quiet.
An email pops up in your outlook inbox and you rush to open it. Someone is looking for a record you have stored in your inactive records room. You begin to perspire; will you have time to pull the record before the mail arrives? They need this record asap. You throw open your inventory log and find the record and its box number.
Perfect. Half way there.
You speed walk to a tall metal shelf and beginning stacking large white boxes into a towering mountain. After several minutes of frantic stacking, you uncover the box you need. You wipe some sweat from your brow and lift up the lid, expecting to be greeted by the record you ne-
it’s not there.
You check every record in the box, then triple check. You’re panicking. You have no idea where this record went. It couldn’t have been destroyed– its permanent! You begin to get dizzy; the stacked boxes start to lean in and the room grows dim… and then you notice it. A single piece of paper sticking out from the tightly packed folders. It’s an out-card bearing the name of the department that emailed you and the file you’re looking for. You do a quick check of the files you’re currently refiling, then reach back out to the requesting department. You tell them about the out-card and explain that they requested this record last month. A few moments later they write back and tell you they still have the record.
You breathe a sigh of relief.
Out-cards are an extremely important part of records management. An out-card is a temporary placeholder for the record that’s been pulled. Often, a print out of the email requesting the record should suffice. When we pull records in the records management department, we print out three copies of the requesting email. We use one as an out-card, we put one in the envelope with the request, and we file one in our “completed request” file, so we have a record of what requests we’ve filled.
In the above fictional scenario, the department requesting the record should have had a system (or a person) in place to track the movement of their records. An out-card can tell you where a record ISN’T and WHERE and WHEN it WENT, but it can’t give you the exact coordinates to a record’s present location. Also, the person pulling the record should have kept their cool and searched slowly. Boxes of records can be jam-packed and hard to thumb through. Slow and steady is always recommended when hunting for a record – even when there’s pressure to produce the record quickly.
Out-cards are just one of the many things that make up a successful records management program. For more records related tips, tune in next time for another insightful edition of…. For The Record.
This is your friendly neighborhood records management analyst signing out!
Glenn Tolle
Archives and Record Management
08/13/2026