The Document Life Cycle Road to Digital Preservation and Archiving

The Document Life Cycle Road to Digital Preservation and Archiving. Brett Claffee. Document Strategy. Aug. 18 2016.
     What is the difference between documents and records in today’s digital enterprises? Documents do not become records until they are declared a record. "When a document is first created, it is under its author’s control and typically goes into a workflow, put simply—a document life cycle".  When a document is declared a record, it moves from the author’s control to corporate control under the retention schedule, which determines what eventually happens to the record. Typically, a document’s life cycle involves these phases:

• Creation
• Management
• Storage
• Retrieval
• Distribution
• Disposal

When a document is declared a record, it "becomes subject to corporate control and cannot be destroyed until it meets all of its retention obligations, including being released from any legal, financial, or regulatory holds". Record types with long-term retention requirements may be kept permanently.

There are differences between digital preservation and archiving and how they look at documents and record life cycles. Records life cycle adds retention and archiving as a phase,which includes document destruction as part of the document life cycle.

The digital archiving and preservation is a multi-layered process, that deals with "provenance and authentication practices, to chain of custody and accountability, to format transformations—all designed to keep information legitimate, useful, and, if required for long-term retention, preserved". With the large volume of data inf recent years, data archiving has come to the forefront. It is estimated that there are more than 30 billion documents used each year in the United States. Archiving provides five critical advantages:

1. Ensuring regulatory compliance for data retention, data immutability, and audit trails
2. Improving performance and productivity of current business applications
3. Making archived records widely available and easy to retrieve by authorized users
4. Removing the problems of maintaining obsolete systems just for the data
5. Reducing IT costs and time for back-up, upgrades, and other needs

For records, organizations can follow a retention schedule, but a retention schedule for documents and data are not as clear. The life span of these are often looked at in terms of use, informatics and analytics. A life cycle approach can assure consistent control.

Digital Preservation Matters.