by Tech. Sgt. J.C. Woodring
Air Reserve Personnel Center Public Affairs
10/2/2006 - DENVER (AFPN) -- Continuing the process of transferring personnel records to an electronic format, Air Force officials will begin scanning the Unit Personnel Record Group of active-duty Airmen in October.
"There is only one copy of the UPRG kept at each unit," said Jo Hogue, chief of master personnel records at the Air Force Personnel Center at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. "If something happens to that hard copy, there is nothing we can do about it. Converting the records from paper to an electronic format also provides an additional backup version of each record."
After all the active-duty records are complete, which Mrs. Hogue said will take about 1.5 years, the conversion of Reserve and Air National Guard records will begin.
Air Reserve Personnel Center officials here began receiving calls recently from reservists who were worried about their records being destroyed.
While the paper copies of the records will eventually be destroyed, it will only happen after the electronic copy has undergone a quality review and backups are stored at separate locations.
"If people are still concerned or just want a hard copy of their record, they can get one," said Debi Young, ARPC Records Quality Management director.
Unit reservists can contact their servicing military personnel flights for copies. Once the UPRG is scanned, members will have access to view their entire record electronically. This will actually make the record more accessible to members than it is at present.
Paper copies for individual mobilization augmentees and Participating Individual Ready Reserve Airmen are stored at ARPC, and the scanning will be done on site here.
Today, master personnel records are stored electronically in the Automated Records Management System and many of the documents in the UPRG are already in the system, said Linda Berkey, ARPC director of staff. Documents that are only stored in the UPRG and have been designated as a master document will be scanned into the existing master record.
What this means is that people should not worry, she said. Their master record is not affected; it will only contain more documents in the future.
If reservists need copies of any documents from their records, they can request a copy online at https://arpc.afrc.af.mil/vPC-GR/newrequest.asp. Officials said depending on the volume of requests, it could take as long as 45 days to receive a copy.
