Managing digital records in a global environment: A review of the landscape of international standards and good practice guidelines

This paper aims to widen as well as deepen the discussion on standards and good practice guidelines beyond just local or regional efforts and include international developments.

An extensive review of literature was used to develop an outline of existing standards and good practice guidelines that are used by records management professionals to manage digital records.

The analysis reveals that there has been a long tradition in standards and good practice guidelines development dating back to the 1980s. The study also reveals that there are two broad categories of standards and good practice guidelines, those with assessment mechanisms and those without such mechanisms. The choice of whether to have an assessment mechanism depends on the purpose for which a standard or good practice guideline is developed.

The paper explores an extensive array of standards and good practice guidelines, their utility and their geographical coverage. It demonstrates how different terms such as Electronic Records Management Systems, Electronic Document Management Systems, Electronic Document and Records Management Systems and Enterprise Content Management have been used without much clarity on how these terms relate to each other, and proposes a clarification framework.