What is a Record?

Posted on Feb 21, 2010 in Records Management News

Source US Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency

http://www.epa.gov/records/what/quest2.htm

Records include 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 in them.
(Taken from 44 U.S.C. Chap­ter 33, Sec. 3301)

Sev­eral key terms, phrases, and con­cepts in the statu­tory def­i­n­i­tion of records are defined as follows:

1.

Doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als is a col­lec­tive term for records, non­record mate­ri­als, and per­sonal papers that refers to all media con­tain­ing recorded infor­ma­tion, regard­less of the nature of the media or the method(s) or circumstance(s) of record­ing.
2.

Regard­less of phys­i­cal form or char­ac­ter­is­tics means that the medium may be paper, film, disk, or other phys­i­cal type or form; and that the method of record­ing may be man­ual, mechan­i­cal, pho­to­graphic, elec­tronic, or any other com­bi­na­tion of these or other tech­nolo­gies.
3.

Made means the act of cre­at­ing and record­ing infor­ma­tion by agency per­son­nel in the course of their offi­cial duties, regard­less of the method(s) or the medium involved. The act of record­ing is gen­er­ally iden­ti­fi­able by the cir­cu­la­tion of the infor­ma­tion to oth­ers or by plac­ing it in files acces­si­ble to oth­ers.
4.

Received means the accep­tance or col­lec­tion of doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als by agency per­son­nel in the course of their offi­cial duties regard­less of their ori­gin (for exam­ple, other units of their agency, pri­vate cit­i­zens, pub­lic offi­cials, other agen­cies, con­trac­tors, Gov­ern­ment grantees) and regard­less of how trans­mit­ted (in per­son or by mes­sen­ger, mail, elec­tronic means, or by any other method). In this con­text, the term does not refer to mis­di­rected mate­ri­als. It may or may not refer to loaned or seized mate­ri­als depend­ing on the con­di­tions under which such mate­ri­als came into agency cus­tody or were used by the agency. Advice of legal coun­sel should be sought regard­ing the “record” sta­tus of loaned or seized mate­ri­als.
5.

Pre­served means the fil­ing, stor­ing, or any other method of sys­tem­at­i­cally main­tain­ing doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als by the agency. This term cov­ers mate­ri­als not only actu­ally filed or oth­er­wise sys­tem­at­i­cally main­tained but also those tem­porar­ily removed from exist­ing fil­ing sys­tems.
6.

Appro­pri­ate for preser­va­tion means doc­u­men­tary mate­ri­als made or received which in the judg­ment of the agency should be filed, stored, or oth­er­wise sys­tem­at­i­cally main­tained by an agency because of the evi­dence of agency activ­i­ties or infor­ma­tion they con­tain, even though the mate­ri­als may not be cov­ered by its cur­rent fil­ing or main­te­nance proce