A record consists of information created, received and maintained as evidence of business activities.  The records should correctly reflect what was communicated on or decided, or what action was taken.  The records should be able to support the needs of the business to which it relates and must be able to be used for accountability purposes.

Documents that are required by statute or regulation (financial records), have financial obligations (contracts) or legal claims (litigation case files) and communicates organisational requirements (policies / procedures) would be considered a record.

Correspondence systems

• Physical paper in our files e.g. letters, memos, minutes, contracts, marketing materials and reports etc.
• Electronic messages such as email content and their attachments, instant messages e.g. hotmail, Skype, SMS, fax, voice, graphics, animation, sound, scanned images etc.
• Content on a web site, documents that reside on PDA‘s (Personal Digital Assistants), flash drives, desktops, servers and document management systems
• Information captured on various databases

Non-correspondence systems

• Maps, plans, drawings, photographs
• Microforms

Microfilm is the oldest type of microform which stores images of document pages side by side on 16, 35, 70 or 100 mm film.  Each reel of film has a standard size of 100 feet and can hold up to 2500 letter size

images or up to 30000 smaller size images.  When a document that is stored on microfilm needs to be read, the film images are enlarged and projected on a visual display screen.  

Microfiche is a sheet of film containing miniature images arranged in rows and columns on a card.  The number of images that can be arranged on one fiche depends on the reduction ratio being used.  The standard size of a fiche is 6 by 4 inches, with the fiche coded for retrieval purposes.  It can hold up to 98 images In 7 rows, with 4 images in each row.

Ultrafiche is like a microfiche except that the page images are reduced more than 90 times.

This storage form is still utilised by various industries.  The National Archives in Pretoria stores historical documents on microforms in order to protect them.  Car companies like Volvo keep all the parts of the cars on microfiche and newspapers store the archived editions on microfiche.

• Audio visual – sound and video cassettes
• Business applications – financial management systems, human resource management systems, supply chain management systems and customer relationship management systems

If there is a lawsuit, all of these – including the copies that individuals have retained and any items deleted from the system, may be identified as discoverable.  This means that all of the above could be used against an organisation in a lawsuit.