Managing Physical Records

Managing physical records involves a variety of diverse disciplines. At the simplest, physical records must be organized and indexed. In more complex environments, records management demands expertise in forensics, history, engineering, and law. Records management then resolves to being a coordination of many experts to build and maintain the system.
Records must be identified and authenticated. In a business environment, this is usually a matter of filing business documents and making them available for retrieval. However, in many environments, records must be identified and handled much more carefully.
Following four steps are useful to understand for managing physical records
1. Identifying records
2. Storing records
3. Circulating records
4. Dispositioning of records

1. Identifying records. If an item is presented as a record, it must be first examined as to its relevance, and it must be authenticated. Forensic experts may need to examine a document or artifact to determine that it is not a forgery, or if it is genuine, that any damage, alterations, or missing content is documented. In extreme cases, items may be subjected to a microscope, x-ray, radiocarbon dating or chemical analysis to determine their authenticity and prior history. This level of authentication is rare, but requires that special care be taken in the creation and retention of the records of an organization.

2. Storing records. Records must be stored in such a way that they are both sufficiently accessible and are safeguarded against environmental damage. A typical contract or agreement may be stored on ordinary paper in a file cabinet in an office. However, many records file rooms employ specialized environmental controls including temperature and humidity. Vital records may need to be stored in a disaster-resistant safe or vault to protect against fire, flood, earthquakes and even war. In extreme cases, the item may require both disaster-proofing and public access, which is the case with the original, signed US Constitution. Even civil engineers must be consulted to determine that the file room can effectively withstand the weight of shelves and file cabinets filled with paper; historically, some military vessels were designed to take into account the weight of their operating procedures on paper as part of their ballast equation (modern record-keeping technologies have transferred much of that information to electronic storage). In addition to on-site storage of records, many organizations operate their own off-site records centers or contract with commercial records centers.
We will discuss on Circulating records and Dispositioning of records in next post.

ref : wikipedia, leadorganizer, agencymanagementsystem, shopblindsonline, premierinns