3 - Records management

Summary

Introduction

‘[Records management is] the field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposition of records, including processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records.’

ISO 15489-1:2001 (E) Information and documentation –Records management – Part 1: general

Chapter 1 defined records management as ‘a comprehensive regime which controls records through their lifecycle, including: deciding what records to create; organizing them so that they support business needs and authorized retrieval; evaluating and imposing retention requirements; documented destruction or designation as archives’. I think of records management as encompassing everything that happens to records from the point that someone conceives the need to document something to the point that record is destroyed – and if it is not destroyed it continues to be managed as an archival record indefinitely. However, as this book makes a distinction between the main phases of the lifecycle broadly based on currency and custodianship, this chapter deals with what happens when records are no longer needed constantly for current business purposes to support the operational work of end-users. It is at this stage that records managers – professionals whose main function is concerned with managing records effectively – usually get custody of the records, or at least get involved. The next chapter deals with managing archives, which requires a different set of skills (sometimes from a different individual) and different storage facilities, to look after records which need to be kept indefinitely for reasons separate from immediate business needs.

Records lifecycle: a metaphor to describe the existence span of records divided into stages to reflect the different processes needed to manage them.

According to our Chapter 1 definition, records are: ‘recorded information in any media or format, providing reliable evidence of human activity’. Thus, records management is exactly what the term implies: managing records. It is about control, about knowing what records the organization needs and creates as well as making sure the records are organized effectively. Moreover, it is about understanding what the organization does and which records arise from its functions and activities. We noted earlier this link between activity and record: records arise from work, rather than the work aim being to create records.