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Records glossary

Distinguish concepts that affect authority, quality and lifecycle.

Terms and boundaries

Concept	Meaning
Document / record	A document carries content; a record is retained as evidence of activity under context/policy.
Official record	Registered/declared and governed by permissions/policies, not merely uploaded.
Metadata / file plan	Descriptions/context/relations; versioned records classification schemes.
Custody / provenance	Possession/transfers; origins and processing/version history.
Retention / legal hold	Retention by duration/trigger; scoped, authorized disposition holds.
Disposition	Reviewed, approved transfer or end-of-retention action, not simply deletion.
Fixity	Compare bytes with reference values; does not establish provenance alone.
SIP / AIP / DIP	Submission / archival / dissemination packages under OAIS.
Preservation / backup	Preservation retains long-term readability/context; backups aid recovery.
Migration / conversion	Move environments/repositories; change formats/representations with validation.
Rendition / representation	Purpose-specific representations linked to records and lineage.
Accepted / billable	Accepted outputs / contractually chargeable outputs, two distinct states.

Connect paper and born-digital records through persistent identifiers, policies and evidence.

Exercise ingest → job tracking → registration → verification with synthetic data.

Each evidence type answers a different question; hashes, timestamps and approvals are not interchangeable.

Agree record classes, quality criteria, permissions and evidence before scaling.