Applying Document Retention in SharePoint 2010

According to MSDN, “An information management policy is a set of rules that govern the availability and behavior of a certain type of important content.” Retention rules are considered a kind of information management policy. (Note: information management policies are only available for the SharePoint 2010 server product, and are not available in SharePoint Foundation 2010.) You can create retention policies in several ways:

• You can create a retention policy definition within your site collection, then apply that policy to content types throughout the site.
• You can create a retention policy that’s associated with a content type that’s defined in the root of the site collection.
• You can create a retention policy that’s associated with a local content type that has been applied to a list or library.
• You can create a retention policy directly on a list or library itself

More Infor: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2011/10/03/applying-document-retention-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx