Scope and purpose

The aim of the Principles and Functional Requirements for Records in Digital Office Environments project is to produce globally harmonised principles and functional requirements for software used to create and manage digital records in office environments. There currently exist a number of jurisdiction-specific functional requirements and software specifications. The project's objective is to synthesise this existing work into requirements and guidelines to meet the needs of the international archives, records and information management community and to enable that community to liaise, in a consolidated manner, with the global software industry.

The objectives of the project are to:

• enable better management of records in organisations;

• support the business needs of an organisation by enabling greater effectiveness and efficiency of the operations;

• provide, through wider deployment of automated records functionality, enhanced abilities to support auditing activities;

• improve capabilities to comply with statutory mandates specified in various information-related legislation (for example, data protection and privacy);

• ensure good governance (for example, accountability, transparency and enhanced service delivery) through good management of records;

• increase general awareness of automated records management capabilities via the dissemination of key principles; and maximise cross-jurisdictional consistency regarding the articulation of functional requirements for managing records and to enable the global archives, records and information management community to speak with one voice to the software vendor community.

The primary focus of this suite of guidelines and requirements is the creation and management of digital records. While the modules support the long-term preservation of digital records, processes to achieve this are beyond the scope of the project. It is anticipated that the application of the requirements will be global in nature. Therefore, it is impossible, given the wide juridical range of potential applications, to include detailed implementation guidelines. In addition, as the ultimate testing environment for the basis of these modules is yet to be determined, inclusion of specific software test cases or scripts was deemed beyond the scope of the modules.