What are Electronic Records?

What are Electronic Records?

All records can be defined as documents, regardless of form or medium, created or received, maintained and used by an agency, organisation (public or private) or individual in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business, of which they themselves form a part or provide evidence. Records are time bound and cannot be altered in any way without creating a new record.

An electronic record is a record that can be manipulated, transmitted or processed by a computer. It is

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  written on magnetic or optical medium (including magnetic tapes, cassettes, CD ROMs, hard disks and diskettes)
  
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  recorded in binary code
  
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  accessed using computer software and hardware
  
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  easily manipulated (that is, updated, deleted and so on).
  

Although it is easy to manipulate electronic records, it is critical to recognise that every time a record is updated or manipulated in any way the result becomes a new record.

Electronic records and data are not the same thing. Data comprises raw unformatted information. It is easily manipulated, updated, edited, copied and reused. Data lacks context and structure and is therefore meaningless on its own. Records, on the other hand, derive meaning from their context and structure as well as their content.

It is important to understand, however, that records may be derived from data and data may be derived from records. They complement one another. For example, unaggregated data may be consolidated and structured to produce a report. Aggregated information contained in a report may be extracted and input into a database where it is held as unaggregated data until such time that it is compiled into a new report. The qualities of data ands records are illustrated in Figure 1 below.

Students should note that in the field of information management and data processing, a ‘record’ is defined as a grouping of inter-related data elements forming the basic unit of a computer file. This concept is entirely different from the record-keeping concept of an electronic record and the two should not be confused. To clarify, the two definitions are shown below.

Traditionally, records have been physical objects. They were recorded on a medium (usually paper) by means of symbols (letters, numbers, figures and so on) that people could access, or read, directly. Electronic records are recorded on a medium such as a magnetic tape or a disk, but their status as records is not dependent upon that medium; in effect they are ‘permanently’ recorded on the medium, but the medium is not the record. Electronic records must be viewed as logical rather than physical entities because they cannot be read directly without the aid of computer software and hardware to interpret the codes used to represent letters, numbers, figures and so on. As logical entities, electronic records have three attributes: content, context and structure, which can be explained as follows.

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  Content is what the record says.
  
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  Structure relates to both the appearance and arrangement of the content (for example, the layout, fonts, page and paragraph breaks, tables, graphs, charts and so on) and the relationship of the record to other related records in the system (ie the links). This includes structural information about the application software used to create the record’s content and information about the system (the platform, hardware and so on) that manages the links between records.
  
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  Context is the background information that helps explain the meaning of the document. This includes two types of information. Firstly, there is information that identifies the particular document, such as the title, author and date of creation. Secondly, there is information about the creator and the purpose of creation, for instance, the nature of the business function or activity, the creating agency and unit concerned.
  

Based on the example shown in the figure, identify the content, structure and context of a document (paper or electronic) you have received recently.