What is Records Management?

• Overview
• What is a Record?
• The Benefits of Good Records Keeping

Overview

Records management is an administrative function responsible for the creation, organization, maintenance, use, retrieval, and disposition of records. It assures that valuable records are identified, preserved and made available, and that needless records are disposed of in a timely fashion.

Information - a key institutional resource - often cannot be located quickly or at all. This can be because records are poorly organized or because too much information of short term value has been kept too long and records of long term value have been destroyed too soon. Sound records keeping practices within a records management program help to ensure that information can be quickly and easily found.

What is a Record?

A record is recorded information regardless of format or characteristics created or received and set aside in the course of business. Records are the evidence of daily business activities. Employees create records whenever they produce or retain the recorded material that documents business transactions.

Records are created on a variety of media: paper, audio and visual recordings; tapes and films, photographs, maps and drawings, and electronic media such as email, databases, word processing, and spread sheets.

All records created by individuals in their capacity as employees of the Board of Governors of Exhibition Place or of the Canadian National Exhibition are the property of the Board of Governors. As such, records cannot be destroyed without the authorization of the Board of Governors of Exhibition Place and the Archivist of the City of Toronto.

The Benefits of Good Records Keeping

• Ease of retrieval: Good records keeping practices make it easier to locate and retrieve records.
• Continuity: Preservation of the institutional memory ensures business continuity long after an employee leaves the organization. Without complete records and the documentation of activities, new staff are unable to fully understand past practices. Records of corporate memory are important in recalling and preserving an organization's past decisions and actions.
• Efficiency: Poor records keeping often means that records are kept long after their value has expired. This makes useful records harder to find and takes up valuable office space.
• Accountability: Records, as the evidence of business actions, provide the means by which employees are accountable for their actions and decisions to the tax payers of the City of Toronto.
• Liability: Well-managed records enable the institution to better defend its legal rights and minimize or eliminate legal liability. Properly maintained records allow the institution to accurately reconstruct past events.