A record can be defined as "information created, received, and maintained as evidence and as an asset by an organization or person, in pursuit of legal obligations or in the transaction of business". (ISO 15489-1:2016)
The term ‘record’ is commonly used in government, business, and archival settings while other domains often make use of other terms. Note that a recently published British Standard BS 10025:2021 (Code of practice for the management of records) has been written in a way which enables the reader to use whichever terms work best for them and their organisation to describe what they produce, receive and accumulate – whether that is 'data', 'documents', 'information' or 'records' (or a combination of these and other related terms).
To ensure that records can be properly understood once removed from an EDRMS it is necessary to capture not only the information communicated as their content (often recorded in binary formats), but also the context of the transactions that created them and their relationships with other records, as well as the structure used to present information to users.
For the sake of consistency this document uses the term ‘record’ to refer to the combination of content, contextual and structural information held within a record keeping system identified as needing to be preserved.
A record typically comprises:
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record content, for example:
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Minutes from a meeting recorded in a Microsoft Word document
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A technical report published as a PDF
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A presentation recorded as a digital video
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record context, for example:
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Who created a record?
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Which business process created the record?
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How does the record relate to other records or information?
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record structure, for example:
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Which software created the record?
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In what format was the record created?
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How was it presented to users?
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Contextual and structural information about records are usually recorded as metadata although it can often be difficult to capture from systems lacking sophisticated export functionality. Record metadata, may include:
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Descriptive (e.g. title, description, creator, creation date)
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Rights (e.g permissions, intellectual property)
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Technical (e.g. format, filename, size)
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Administrative (e.g. retention period, disposition date, audit logs)
To be trusted, a record must have the following characteristics:
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Authenticity: The record is what it purports to be, was created or sent by who purports to have done so, and was created or sent when it purports to have been.
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Reliability: The contents of the record can be trusted as a full and accurate representation of the facts to which they attest.
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Integrity: The record is complete and unaltered. Any authorised additions or annotations are explicitly indicated and traceable.
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Usability: The record can be located, retrieved and presented in a timely manner. It should be linked to any related records including groupings or aggregations of records.
In many cases, an organization must ensure these characteristics are maintained for as long as the record exists. This brings particular challenges where the lifespan of the record is longer than that of the system in which it was stored.
Some records can be disposed of after a few years have passed but others have much longer retention periods and some must be retained indefinitely as archives. How these records (and their characteristics) can be effectively captured and preserved for the long term is a challenge faced by many organisations.