Project documentation, minutes of meetings, emergency plans, and inspection reports are all examples of records, recorded information. There is a changeover from paper-based records to electronic records in many organizations and these organizations often implement information systems managing electronic records that only take archival requirements into consideration to some extent, if at all. This is a problem that makes preservation of electronic records difficult. The aim of this paper is to describe the characteristics of records, based on a study of empirical data and archival theory. It is essential to identify and understand the characteristics of a record in order to manage and preserve records in computerised systems. Knowledge of what characteristics a record has is one way to make it possible to formalize records. Formalization at different levels is needed for computerized management of records. This paper is based on a qualitative case study performed at four different organizations in Sweden. Empirical data was collected from multiple sources within each organization and resulted in five groups of characteristics with several sublevels. The empirical data were compared with recordkeeping and archival theory. Based on this study the essential characteristics of records were identified as context, form, organization, structure and version/copy.

In many organizations there is changeover from paper-based records to electronic records. This is a natural process, when more and more information and documents are created by the usage of computer based information system. The problem is that many organizations implement information systems for managing electronic records, which not takes recordkeeping requirements into consideration to full extent. Record keeping system must fulfil requirements regarding context. This is necessary because it have to be possible to make interpretations of records, over time. The aim of this paper is to describe how much and what kind of traces of the handling process there are in paper based archives. A qualitative empirical study will be conducted. The method include interpretations of paper based records with an aim to model processes. The study includes comparisons between periods, before and after implementation of computerized systems. The process models will be analyzed and validated by dialog seminars. The contributions of this paper are; firstly descriptions of process elements that make it possible to interpret processes and records afterwards; secondly descriptions of differences of those process-elements between different time periods, thirdly: the process models will be important inputs when designing efficient digital record keeping in integrated e-services.