n.REH-kurdinformation or data stored on a medium and used as an extension of human memory or to support accountabilityFitzroy 1938, 124The thing to be marveled at is that social and economic historians have made so little use of the records of so vital an institution and records so rich in social detail.Evans and Weiner 1938, 186A record may be a sheet of paper with some writing on it, or a single map. In this case a record becomes synonymous with a document. Every item in a volume or file of mortgages is a record, and the container taken as a whole is also a record.Binkley 1939, 162We have among ourselves our little technical problems, such as the question of the distinguishing between archives and manuscripts: we cannot expect the public to be very much interested in technical minutia; but we can expect the public to become conscious of an archival problem generally, to assist in laying down a broad archival policy, and to share our vision of the place that the preservation of records has in the whole culture of our country.Nuermberger 1941, 252In addition over eleven hundred manuscript volumes had been acquired. These included diaries, ledgers, account books, daybooks, sermons, lecture notes, and other varieties of records.Buck 1945a, 109That original records are valuable for checking the authenticity of printed versions of them, of secondary writings, and of memory and tradition is well known, at least to scholars and lawyers; but it is not so well known that much the greater part of the recorded experience of men as individuals and in their institutional relationships exists only in the form of unprinted records.Leahy 1945, 233The Constitution at that time had been in service eighteen years. If an inventory had been prepared of her paperwork and records before she went into that action, it would have shown a volume of material filling two modern file drawers. It included an order book; journals or logs of the captain, lieutenant, sailing master, surgeon, and midshipmen; inventories of the stores and supplies charged to the several departments or officers aboard; several ledgers of expenses; a sheaf of charts; a metal bound signal book, several handsfull [sic] of letters and receipts; some payrolls; and a muster roll.Hall 1952, 6The National Archives did approve the disposal of about two years’ accumulation of these files on the basis of the samples submitted; but it refused, and rightly so, to grant any authorization for the continuous disposal of the records.Yates 1989, 12Henry Metcalfe argued “Now, administration without records is like music without notes—by ear. Good as far as it goes—which is but a little way—it bequeaths [sic] nothing to the future. Except in the very rudest industries, carried on as if from hand to mouth, all recognize that the present must prepare for the demands of the future, and hence records, more or less elaborate, are kept.”Turnbaugh 1990, 563The results showed that some programs appraised records primarily for their informational value, i.e., what they contain about persons, places, and subjects with which public agencies deal. Others appraised records primarily for their evidential value or what they reveal about the agency or program’s structure and functions.Dearstyne 1993, 1Records are extensions of the human memory, purposefully created to record information, document transactions, communicate thoughts, substantiate claims, advance explanations, offer justifications, and provide lasting evidence of events. Their creation results from a fundamental human need to create and store information, to retrieve and transmit it, and to establish tangible connections with the past.Duff 1996, 29Records, the fundamental instrument of business transactions, are mutating from a concrete, static, structured document to formless, dynamic data that resides in a computer’s memory or on a disk. As records migrate from a stable paper reality to an intangible electronic existence, their physical attributes, vital for establishing the authenticity and reliability of the evidence they contain, are threatened.McGovern and Samuels 1997, 20Data become records when the content, context, and structure are tied together to provide both meaning and functionality.Lemieux 2001, 91–92Even within the archival profession, there are many differences among archivists’ conceptualization of records. Perhaps the argument is best summed up with the observation that one person’s “management information” is another person’s “record.” . . . More generally, the research offers a warning to archivists to be wary of assuming that archival conceptualizations about records are absolutes when they are only one possible way of understanding recorded information.Park 2001, 273Indiana University’s Electronic Records Project . . . found that records exist within the structure and context of information systems as the consequence of a business event, but not as discrete physical objects.InterPARES 2002, 7A record is assumed to be a representation of a fact or act that is memorialized on a physical carrier—that is, a medium—and preserved by a physical or juridical person in the course of carrying out its activities. It follows that a record cannot exist before its elements have been inscribed or affixed to a medium.Piñar 2003, 166All images constitute a record, irrespective of the value we may attach to the information they contain.Pearce-Moses 2007, 15Consider the records created today that you will want to acquire for your archives. Familiar formats are being digitally transformed. Correspondence is e-mail. Diaries are now blogs. Typescripts are word processing files. Reports are Web pages.Yeo 2007, 337To differentiate records from other kinds of representation, records can be characterized as persistent representations of activities, created by participants or observers of those activities or by their authorized proxies.Jimerson 2009, 27The term “record” comes from combining the Latin words cor (“heart”) and dar (“to give”), emphasizing that a record gives information back to the heart and mind after the passing of time. By developing systems of signs and symbols to represent spoken words and numerical concepts, people found a method to store information in a fixed form, so that it could be retrieved and used with accuracy and precision.Xie 2011, 583The reproduction is no longer an original but a copy. To be effective, on the other hand, the completed record needs to cross either time, space, or both to reach its intended recipients, which, however, cannot be accomplished without the record being saved. As a result, while the term original record is still used for convenience purposes, the concept of original—as defined for traditional records—ceases to exist. In the digital world, every instantiation of a record is now a copy.Gilliland 2014a, 176Consensus about the nature of the record, whether electronic or not, among the varying definitions used in both archival research and practice can be summarized as follows: a record is always associated with some action, transaction, or event; a record can be a product, a by-product of, or even an agent or actor in an action, transaction, or event; and a record includes, at a minimum, a definable set of metadata that serves to provide contextual and other forms of evidence about that action, transaction, or event.U.S. Code, 44 USC 3301“Records” includes all books, papers, maps, photographs, machine readable materials, or other documentary materials, regardless of physical form or characteristics, made or received by an agency of the United States Government under Federal law or in connection with the transaction of public business and preserved or appropriate for preservation by that agency or its legitimate successor as evidence of the organization, functions, policies, decisions, procedures, operations, or other activities of the Government or because of the informational value of data in them. Library and museum material made or acquired and preserved solely for reference or exhibition purposes, extra copies of documents preserved only for convenience of reference, and stocks of publications and of processed documents are not included.information or data created or received by an organization in the course of its activities; organizational recordGotlieb 1960, 29Every librarian of historical papers and records is involved in the necessity of making collections available for use as soon as possible by having the material listed in some set order.MacDermot 1960, 408Departmental records later than 1909, for example, are closed, and even the earlier ones may be consulted only by permission of the librarian or custodian. To consult records later than 1909 approval by the head of the department concerned is necessary. Again, regarding the personal and professional papers of staff members (which the Archives is particularly glad to receive), Mr. Shipton stresses the tight restrictions placed on confidential papers.Jones 1975, 326But, try as Lester Cappon, Julian Boyd, and many more of us may, we seem unable to spread beyond the confines of a tiny fraternity of ineffective archivists the difference between “papers”—i.e., the personal emissions and accumulations of an individual or family—and “records,” i.e., the organic body of materials made and received in connection with one’s official duties.Cook 1975, 299Traditional concepts regarding the ownership of and access to the papers of public officials have been challenged by events of the last several years and particularly by activities closely associated with the administration of President Richard M. Nixon. Heretofore, politicians, archivists, and historians had accepted policies dictated by the belief that the President owned the papers and records of his office and of the officials most closely connected with the White House as his own personal property and had the constitutional right to set the terms of access.Lytle 1980b, 425First, the task force will study present descriptive practices, with the objective of establishing minimum standards for descriptive elements (and the form of those elements) for records and manuscript collections.DACS 2013, 21Nature of the Archival Unit 2.3.19 Archival materials are frequently described by devised aggregate terms such as papers (for personal materials), records (for organizational materials), or collection (for topical aggregations).Larson 2020, 6When governments adopt Big Data strategies, the resulting transactional records have inherent bonds to the data they are based upon.Audiovisual Recordsa phonodiscSprinkle 1995, 459By the time microgroove records appeared in the late 1940s, the industry settled on sapphire and diamond styli. The shape of the stylus also changed through the years from a spherical shape for the 78 rpm discs to an elliptical shape for long-playing records.Paton 1998, 193The appearance on the surface of the disc of plasticizer residue (as opposed to mold) is a sign that a record is likely an acetate and not a regular LP or other commercial phonodisc; peeling plastic coating that exposes a metal, glass, or cardboard base material, is, of course, another good indicator.Weihs 2014, 14The terminology associated with recorded sound demonstrates the changes in terminology. One term that caused controversy was phonorecord (phonodisc; phonotape), the term used in the first Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, published in 1967.Computinga collection of related data elements treated as a unit, such as the fields in a row in a database table; a data recordEvans, Harrison, and Thompson 1974, 428RECORD. . . . (2) In machine-readable records/archives, two or more data fields in predetermined order and treated as a unit.SAA 1979, 192RECORD. A discrete item of information (or data element) in a specified arrangement that is treated as a unit and refers to one person, place, or thing. In an automated retrieval system for an archives, a record could consist of inventory information about a single archival series.Wheaton 1982, 458–459Like any database system, data records that contain the desired information are each associated with one or more keys. A key is a characteristic address that leads directly to the associated data record; in INFOS the keys may be of any pre-established length. The same record may be addressed by several different keys, each occupying its place in a different sequence of keys.Hensen 1986, 34On the broadest level the AMC format itself represents a kind of standard. It has been designed to accommodate any kind of information or data about collections that archivists care to record. All that is required is that certain technical and structural standards be followed in using the format (particularly in such areas as fixed-field coding, record and field delimiters, and subfield coding), and that the various elements of description be entered into the specific fields that have been designated for them.an entry describing a work in a catalog; a catalog recordMichelson 1987, 196Reliance on a catalog for authority control ultimately harms retrieval. If two-thirds of the names entered are not screened for system-wide consistency and there is inadequate control of one-half of the respondents’ RLIN AMC records, inconsistency is surely epidemic.Zboray 1987, 212At first glance dBASE III Plus seems to be adequate to the needs of even moderately large archives. Up to a billion records and a total of 2 billion bytes can be controlled.Smither 1987, 333The effective quality of information in a data base, in other words, will be that of the least ambitious of its contributors. For example, if two computerized catalogs are to exchange data, and the first records that data in a normal mixture of upper and lower case with diacritics and accents while the second uses upper case only with no diacritics, the only available common language is that of the second system.Honhart 1989, 81The choice of the AMC format as the structure for the MicroMARC:amc record ensured that the records created on the system would not become obsolete and require reformatting at some future date.Sweetser and Orchard 2019, 340Increasing numbers of institutions are moving to collection management tools like ArchivesSpace, which exports records in multiple bibliographic and archival description standards.Vinson 2019, 428Among these, AVCC, an open-source application developed by AVP, allows users to create an inventory on a web-based platform. It provides the flexibility to create minimal records based on a few required fields or an inventory with more robust records that can include a description, whether the recording is a unique or commercial production, and genre terms.v.rə-KAWRDto preserve information and its continuing accuracy by setting down data in a format expected to persist for at least as long as the data will need to be accessedLubar 1999, 16Indeed, we might generalize this: most archives represent asymmetrical communications. Archives do not simply record information; they record the flow of information, the use of information. Harry 2000, 7Format obsolescence threatens the ability to retrieve the information stored on twentieth-century AV carriers. Not only are the machines that were used to record and play this media back becoming harder to find, but internal belts and rubber rollers also deteriorate, the capacitors and electronic components stop functioning as they should, and either the machines physically will not play back the media correctly or they cannot correctly reproduce the electronic signal.Ketelaar 2001, 133Archivalization precedes archiving. The searchlight of archivalization has to sweep the world for something to light up in the archival sense, before we proceed to register, to record, to inscribe it, in short before we archive it.Thomassen 2001, 376Generally speaking, function and physical form are interrelated: events recorded on paper are of a different kind than events written on parchment and what has been in pencil has a different status to what has been printed.O’Toole and Cox 2006, 30Photography not only presented the opportunity to record information in a new way, but it also offered the possibility that information already recorded in one format could be changed and stored in another.Rettig 2019, 12The other effort I made was during a social hour event at a local water conference, where an open mic provided attendees the opportunity to share flood experiences. I arranged to record the reminiscences, with release forms at the ready.Vinson 2019, 428In her favorable review of AVCC on the American Archivist Reviews Portal, Allyson Smally describes several useful features, such as bulk editing, and specialized fields like a drop-down menu to record acid detection strip readings.
Notes
See narrower terms of nouns for more specific definitions of different types of records.The use of the general term record when referring to a particular type of record inevitably leads to confusion because attributes of the particular type are not conveyed by the general term. In particular, the legal definition of record may change, depending on relevant laws, rules, and regulations.
