The Continuum Document-to-Record and Its Impact in Managing Documents

The most widespread piece of unstructured content in the corporate world is the electronic document. Electronic documents are everywhere, on network drives, as attachments in emails, in content and document management systems, etc. Yet while corporate and archive records benefit from a large body of knowledge, academically and procedurally, the documents are vaguely defined, poorly understood, and badly managed or more often, not at all. This paper will demonstrate that there is no strict separation between the documents and records but a continuum between the ephemeral document and the trustworthy record. The outcome of the recognition of the continuum document-to-record is a new approach in the management of documents.