Keeping or Discarding Records : A Comparison and a Practical Use of Standards for Electronic Records Management

Abstract: The management of records is an essential part of any organization. Today this implies the management of mostly digital records in electronic record management systems. There are many standards for record management. Three influential standards was compared and used to evaluate such an electronic record management system in this thesis. The purposes of the thesis was to find out how the core features support and interfere with each other, and which changes could be done to a system evaluated according to the standards, as well as what the major challenges were when using document standards to evaluate an electronic record management system. The standards were MoReq2010, ISO 15489 and DoD 5012.02. To conform to the standards, some changes could be done to the studied system. For instance, changing document keys and to include more metadata about disposal of records. The conclusions were that standards are a good complementary source when developing an existing record management system, even though their size and complexity level are issues to deal with.