The Society of American Archivists state that archives management is “The general oversight of a program to appraise, acquire, arrange and describe, preserve, authenticate, and provide access to permanently valuable records.” It’s not about day to day business activities, it is to appraise, acquire and preserve records. Records are evidence of actions, decisions and inaction; they are complete and must also be accessible, reliable, authentic, accurate and inviolate.

There is one view that a record is created at the end of the process i.e. when the letter or contract if finalized and therefore declared as a record. Maybe this is the reason for confusion of records management with archive systems. The State Records NSW says that “Records are a valuable corporate asset that by their retention and reuse as evidence of decision making and business activity can improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation”. Records management is therefore an inextricable part of the day to day operations of a business.

The widely adopted ISO 15489 standard defines records management as; “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 definition.”

So we can describe records management as the control of evidence of decisions and business activities for the life of those activities from creation to ultimate disposition, i.e. destruction or archival whatever the end of the records management process is. The ISO definition also refers to the maintenance and use of these records. In the day to day operations of a business, these records of transactions have a life cycle and are the lifeblood of a business. So records management is inextricable tied to the business process and thinking of records management in this way can open up for discussion the value of records management in business.www.communities.hp.com