Record

Record

Record in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Record in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Record may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. A record (or database record) contains the description of a message, the text in which it is encoded, and the documentary unit that contains the text. In some contexts, such a record is now called metadata.

All the information or data in a Information Retrieval database about a particular message, text and documentary unit goes into its record. Examples of such data include: a citation to the text and its documentary unit, including creator, title, publisher or manufacturer, format and medium; an abstract or some other description of the message content and features of the message, text, and documentary unit, sometimes including a small picture (thumbnail) of an image document or a short segment of sound; and all the content and feature terms, descriptors or headings associated with the documentary unit. The database record is usually structured or formatted according to some regular pattern. For example, many library catalogs use the MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) record format, developed initially by the Library of Congress and now a world-wide standard. Many Information Retrieval databases create their own record format. In some database models, especially relational databases, the record is not a single unit, but is a node that contains links to all the data related to a particular message, text and documentary unit. For example, the name of a publisher may be recorded in a table of publishers and the name of an author may be in a table of authors. The particular publishers or authors linked to a particular message, text and documentary unit are called into a record or surrogate display when that display is requested.

In Australia

The Archives Act defines a record as:

“a document (including any written or printed material) or object (including a sound recording, coded storage device, magnetic tape or disc, microform, photograph, film, map, plan or model or a painting or other pictorial or graphic work) that is, or has been, kept by reason of any information or matter that it contains or can be obtained from it or by reason of its connection with any event, person, circumstance or thing”

This definition constructed in the early 1980s views records as physical objects such as paper files, tapes, disks etc. This type of definition presents us with major problems when we are dealing with electronic records. Firstly, records are neither purely documents nor objects. Secondly, in the electronic age of digital copying, records are independent of the medium (an object) on which they originally sat or currently sit. Thirdly, in electronic systems individual records and their components parts are not physically located in a logical sequence or (often) in the same physical space. Lastly, the definition does not provide any evidentiary test.

Because of these problems the Archives has decided, after some research and deliberation, that we needed an updated definition of a ‘record’ which has a generic set of characteristics and that is independent of format:

  • A record is that which is created and kept as evidence of agency or individual functions, activities and transactions.
  • To be considered evidence a record must possess content, structure and context and be part of a recordkeeping system.

This issue is addressed further in the entry on creation and management of records. It is raised here because of the need to clarify the problems raised by the legislative definition in the modern electronic environment.

In the IT environment a ‘record’ is defined, for example in the IBM Dictionary of Computing McGraw Hill New York 1994 p. 561, as:

“(1) an aggregate that consists of data objects, possibly with different attributes, that usually have identifiers attached to them or more succinctly (2) a set of data treated as a unit or a set of one or more data items grouped for processing.”

The closest link between the archival definition of a ‘record’ and IT terminology comes with the definition of a ‘transaction’. For example, transaction, in the above dictionary, is defined as “an exchange between a workstation and another device that accomplishes a particular action or result; e.g. the entry of a customer’s deposit and the updating of a customer’s balance or an item of business such as handling customer orders and customer billing”

Source: based on Australian Archives, Keeping Electronic Records: Policy for Electronic Record keeping in the Commonwealth Government, 1995

Hierarchical Display of Record

Education And Communications > Communications > Audiovisual equipment > Recording
Education And Communications > Documentation > Information service > Record library

Record

Concept of Record

See the dictionary definition of Record.

Characteristics of Record

[rtbs name=”xxx-xxx”]

Resources

Translation of Record

Thesaurus of Record

Education And Communications > Communications > Audiovisual equipment > Recording > Record
Education And Communications > Documentation > Information service > Record library > Record

See also

  • Compact disc
  • Disc
  • CD
  • DVD-audio
  • Audio DVD

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