MCC Daily Tribune

For The Record: Naming Conventions Need Consistency

Picture this:

It’s a beautiful Monday morning. The sky is an opulent shade of blue, the birds are trading tender poetry, and you’re stuck inside, studying the dust that has collected in the crevasses of your keyboard.

This great burst of productivity is interrupted by the sound of an intrusive email notification. You’ve received a request for a record titled: Bob Smith, Renovation Project, Building 6, floor 9, 2023”. The record owner needs this record asap - for a legal case. You quickly jot down the record name and begin searching. To your great relief, the record is not hard to locate. You send the record off to the record owner and pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

Three hours later you get another email notification.

The record you sent was correct, but the record series was incomplete. You rush back to the box you’d searched only to find two more records. The first record is labeled “Building 6, 2023”, and the second is labeled, “Jones and Smith, 6, 9, 23”. You check both these records and find the information that was missing. You jog over to the record owner’s office and toss the sweat slick records into the incoming mail.

ALL this running around could have been avoided if the naming conventions for the records had been consistent! Inconsistent naming conventions can slow down the search for records, causes records series to get broken up and misfiled, or, at worse, get records accidently destroyed. A good inventory sheet would have also helped in this situation.

Records management doesn’t have to rhyme, but naming conventions should stay consistent, all the time.

This has been, another consistently informative episode of…. For The Record.

Glenn Tolle
Internal Audit
09/21/2026