After last weeks overview of the structured records management process, I want to start giving you some details of what each step in the process involves, beginning with the definition step.

Records stored in relational databases, as the name suggests, are made up from individual data items stored in multiple tables, linked to each other using relational links.  This means that not every record is a neat package that is redundantly stored with clear boundaries.  Some data items are shared between many records, others are uniquely stored for each record.

If you want to extract and store the data as long term records without reliance on the source application to maintain their usability, you need to extract it in a format that allows you to execute SQL queries across the data at any point in future. You also need to model the records so that they include all the data required to represent a complete and accurate picture of the data as it was at the time of extracting the record.

Structured records management is a discipline that brings together database administrators and records managers. In our solution we use definition tool that allows graphical browsing and modeling of the data structures to define the records. This allows the database administrator to visualize the data in a way that is easily understandable to people without specialist RDBMS knowledge, such as many records manager.

While you are modeling the data you also want to be able to create rules that you can use to select which records to extract from the system at what point. These may be selection rules such as "All fulfilled orders" or exclusion rules such as "Product is not recalled". This is where the records manager can provide valuable input as to what constitutes a record.  Our definition tool shows you what data is available to build the rules upon and allows you to formulate them right from within the data model.

Once you have defined the data model for the structured records and the rules that you want to use in their creation, you are ready to move to the next step in the process, the classification of the records.

To be continued....