This schedule provides for the retention or disposal of certain records relating to administrative management activites in the Depentment. These activites involve the direction and control of those staff and management improvement programs not under line personnel directly and controling substantive operations and programs. They exclude records of operating personnel, budget, accounting and printing functions covered by other ED schedules, but include records of related specialized procedural and management staffs. Included within the scope of the schedule are the most frequently found files which are created in the course of the organizational planning, development, and simplification of procedures; records management activites; and administration of management improvement programs. Part 18 (Items 12 and 13) provide for the disposition of case files on individuals invoilved in incentive awards and similar types of management improvement programs. Any records created prior to January 1, 1939, must be offered to the National Archives and Records Service before applying these dispositions instructions. The organization locations and titles of administrative management units vary from Federal agency to Federal agency. They may be scattered at numerous levels or locations, or may be centralized. For the purposes of this schedule, the nomenclature standards set forth by the Senate Committee on Government Operations in Senate Report No. 245, 80th Congress, 1st Session, are followed: the first organizational level within the Department is the Assistant Secrtary's level (or the bureau level); subordinate components are successively division, branch, section, and unit. This schedule is based on the presumption that management activites are carries on by a specialized person or unit with at least division-wide and ususally Department-wide responisbilities or by a group of such persons or units in the Department. Although its provisions are applicable to exactly comparable records but without such formal assignments of responsibility. Many similar or comparable records created at lower organizational levels or in regional offices vary so greatly in content, value, and arrangement that they are not covered by this schedule. Because of the nature of the activites documented by administrative management records, a relatively large proportion of them are continuing value. Files pertaining to a management program in a well defined area, such as reports management, consist primarily of detailed case files on each form or report and for a limited period of time are of administrative importance. Files of programs covering broader and more diverse fields, such as organizational planning studies, normally consist largely of project files, which are established for each separate problem assigned for investigation; the resulting case file is usually the continuing value in documenting the history of how the Department conducted its business. In either event there is a residue of ephemeral materials. These may include working papers that do not have a direct bearing on the transaction, preliminary or intermediate drafts of documents and preliminary work sheets that do not represent significant routing slips, and extra copies of documents.
