managing electronic records in governmental bodies - National ...

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Regulations
The National Archives and Records Service of South Africa Regulations, 2002,
Regulation R158 published in the Government Gazette, No 24085 of 20 November
2002
Repository for electronic records
A direct access device on which the electronic records and metadata are stored.
Retention periods
The length of time that records should be retained in offices before they are either
transferred into archival custody or destroyed/deleted. As far as non-archival records
are concerned the head of the office decides on the retention periods in accordance
with the administrative use of the records and the legal obligations the records need
to fulfil. In the case of archival records the National Archives of South Africa Act,
1996 determines that such records must normally be kept for twenty years after the
end of the year in which they were created, before they are transferred into archival
custody.
In an electronic document management system, the length of time a record is kept
online before it is moved to near-line or off-line storage.
Storage area network
A separate, dedicated, high performance, centrally managed, secure network, which
moves data between servers and storage systems.
Structure
This relates to both the appearance and arrangement of the content (for example,
the layout, fonts, page and paragraph breaks, tables, graphs, charts, etc.) and the
relationship of the records to other related records in the system. This includes
structural information about the application software used to create the record's
content and information about the system (the platform, hardware, etc.) that manages
the links between records.
Terminated records
Records which were created or received by a governmental body and which were
managed by a records classification system no longer in use.
Transitory records
Transitory records are those records created by officials but not required by the
governmental bodies for which they work to control, support or document the
delivery of services, or to carry out operations, to make decisions, or to give account
of the activities of government. Such records are needed by officials for only a
limited time to facilitate the completion of routine actions or to prepare a subsequent
record required by a governmental body for the above-mentioned reasons.
Managing electronic records_Policy Guidelines.doc
First Edition
Version 1.1
April 2003