Last summer, I wrote a post about the Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) smoking gun email at the Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) trial and held it up as an example of why every company needs a responsible retention policy--because you never know when a smoking gun lies there just waiting to cost your company lots of money.

At the time, I recalled Google's Cyrus Mistry's keynote at AIIM in 2010 in which he said, "everyone gets access to all data and keep it forever." In my August post, I referred to this as a "pie-in-the-sky, keep-everything-forever policy."

Never let it be said that Ron Miller has a firm position on retention policy because I'm beginning to rethink that idea. That's because it's hard to balance the need to get rid of information and the need to retain it as an historical record or artifact. (Interestingly enough as I was thinking about this column, I came across Lee Dallas's post on Big Men on Content in which he refers to that same August post and begins to rethink his own ideas about retention.)

Dallas was looking at retention as an ethics issue, a perfectly valid way to consider it, but after talking to consultant Cheryl McKinnon from Candy Strategies last week at the ARMA International Conference and Expo, I began to rethink my own position that getting rid of mundane stuff like lunch menus from the cafeteria really made sense. McKinnon has a history background and she rightly pointed out that those menus are part of the historical record. If in a hundred years, researchers wanted to know what types of food people ate in the early 2000s at a company called Google, they might be able to do that if the menus existed.

If they had been deleted as part of a retention schedule, then that information would be lost to us forever and so would a part of our cultural heritage.

That's because historical research often involves the mundane such as diaries, household lists and, yes, menus. Just this past summer I was reading the book At Home by Bill Bryson, in which the author uses these types of historical records to try to discover why we live the way we do today. Many of the rooms we take for granted have roots in something that happened in the 18th or 19th century and Bryson scoured the historical record to try and figure it out.

A hundred years from now, maybe someone will be writing a book called At Work that tries to do the same thing, but if much of the data has been deleted because of responsible retention policies on the part of corporations in the 21st century, much of that record will be lost.

I heard another story while at ARMA about some papers found at the old Tiger Stadium. The stadium, which was replaced several years ago, was scheduled to be demolished. While they were clearing it out, somebody spied an old file cabinet in the corner. After going through it, there were treasures like Ty Cobb's original contract with the team. As the person who related the story told me, if someone hadn't thought to look in that file cabinet, those precious artifacts would have been blown up or thrown away, lost forever.

Which goes to show that we must not only save these records as the Tiger organization did for all those years, we have to understand just what we have as organizations. And instead of looking at this purely from a legal standpoint--that getting rid of stuff you no longer need makes good business sense--perhaps we should be looking at this differently.

The Tigers clearly didn't need to keep an old contract from a long-dead ball player, but they did and it has great significance today to any baseball fan. If they had thrown it out 10 years after he left the organization simply because they had the legal right to, it would have been lost forever to history.

Perhaps we should be thinking about what this means from a historical record perspective as McKinnon has done, and when we do that, Mistry's statement makes a lot more sense.

Unfortunately, we also live in a litigation-crazy world and we need to find ways to balance what to get rid of and what to keep. Painting broad strokes like deleting every email every 90 days might seem like sensible retention policy, but in the long run you may be destroying your corporate memory and your legacy--and you have to consider that as well.

I don't claim there are easy answers to this dilemma, but I do think we should tread more carefully when considering what to destroy inside our organizations, and that perhaps we should start thinking about our impact on history instead of just lawsuits. - Ron