Senior Records Officer

"Information is an unusually powerful commodity. It provides the heart of the development of knowledge, the basis of innovation, the resources for an informed citizenry and thereby, it becomes the commodity for the progress of a society. Nations will flourish or fail depending upon the availability of leaders, professional and citizens who have been educated to understand the power of information and have access to it for decision making and solving the problems of their society. We are living in a time when access to and control of information is becoming the key economic force"

The purpose of this article is to highlight the functioning of the Records and Information Systems of the Directorate that runs both the Manual and electronic formats. The Directorate's records are managed in three major series as detailed below:

• The Subject/Policy records that are mainly operated in the manual system.



• The Personnel records that include both the open and confidential files about staff operated on both the manual and electronic formats and



• The Crime records that are sub-divided into four (4) sub-series as follows:
  
  
  • The Criminal Offences
  • The Criminal Appeals
  • The Criminal Revisions and
  • The Miscellaneous Applications.

These four sub series constitute the bulk of the records. They are also managed in both formats where by the electronic one is operated in a customized application known as PROCAM ( Prosecution Case Administration and Management ). A team of three (3) Records staff headed by a Senior Records Officer, five (5) Data Entrant Clerks and one (1) Office Attendant man the records section at the head office and also oversees the management of the records in the seventy three (73) up-country stations.

At both the Regional and District levels handling of information is a joint venture between the Office Typists and the Office Attendants except for Masaka, Nakawa, and Jinja where the Data Entrant Clerks handle the crime records.

Files are either created or received in the Registry and moved to Action Officers through a routing system that takes ten minutes to have a file handled on both systems. The PROCAM allows only permitted Officers to access this information on their computers, permission to up-date any of this information is strictly controlled by the Principal Systems Administrator who allows only few Data Entrant Clerks to do it and the Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions in charge of Prosecutions whose duty entitles him to do so. The rest of the staff that access this system are permitted as read only users.

The Registry holds approximately 3,000 active files and 10,000 semi and non-active files maintained in the Records Centre. Retrieval of these records is done through retrieval guides kept in the registry that directs the Officer retrieving the record right to the required file in a particular box on a particular shelf location.

AT Regional and District levels retrieval is not as easy as it is at the Head Office most offices do not have Registries segregated from other offices to allow proper handling of the records, lack of trained staff to handle the records in a proper way, lack of Lawyers' application of the importance of records until there are quarries to respond to that need well documented records as evidence. The equipment being used is not up to standard, the Computer knowledge and utilization of the PROCAM package is not yet extended to all stations.

The Records Section of the Directorate needs to be broadened to ensure professional management and administration in the up-country stations, and training given to all staff of the Directorate to appreciate the role of the records in the day to day management to ensure that we live a crime-free society.

The Directorate like other Government Offices experience record congestion due to the fact that appraising of these records to separate records of value for permanent preservation from those of no value for destruction is not yet done. This awaits the building of the National Records Centre/Archives whose existence is still a long way to be achieved.

The Directorates humble appeal to the Ministry of Public service is to have this home availed soon so that the Records and Archives Act can be implemented fully.