Alerts: searches that are run with results emailed automatically; commonly used by researchers to see what’s new in their research area.

Authentication: the process of making sure that a person is allowed to access a resource before giving them access; this is required for remote access to licensed resources and usually involves entering one’s name and ID number/barcode.

Archive: term for inactive records that need to be kept for an extended period of time.

Boolean Operators: also called “logical operators” or just “operators”, these are system commands that allow search sets or search terms to be combined to create narrower or broader results. There is one commonly used operator (AND) and two less commonly used ones (OR and NOT):

• AND – the most commonly used operator; narrows a search by retrieving just those records that have the combined sets in common.
• OR – broadens a search by retrieving records that occur in any of the combined sets; commonly used between synonyms.
• NOT – excludes items in the latter set from those in the former set; note that the order of sets makes a difference: s1 not s2 isn’t the same as s2 not s1.

Business Continuity Management (BCM): is the business process that sets the objectives, scope and requirements for IT service continuity management. BCM is responsible for managing risks that could seriously impact the business. BCM ensures that the business can operate to a minimum agreed level, by reducing the risk to an acceptable level and planning to restore business processes.

Business Intelligence (BI): refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help a business acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. Business intelligence may also refer to the collected information itself.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR): is an approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the business processes that exist within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations to look at their business processes from a new perspective and determine how they can best construct their processes to improve how they conduct business.

Capture: the process of registering a document or record, deciding which class it is to be classified in, adding further metadata to it, and storing it in the system, (e.g. an electronic records management system). The information can, for example, be captured via templates, received in the form of electronic documents from external sources, acquired by scanning paper documents or by taking snapshots of information contained in operational databases, corporate intranets and internet sites.

Content Management: the processes and workflows involved in organizing, categorizing, and structuring information resources so that they can be stored, published, and reused in multiple ways. A content management system (CMS) is used to collect, manage and publish content, storing the content either as components or whole documents, while maintaining the links between components. It may also provides for content revision control.

Content Management System (CMS): supports the creation, management, distribution, publishing, and discovery of corporate information. Also known as ‘web content management’ (WCM), these systems typically focus on online content targeted at either a corporate website or intranet.

Conversion: refers to the process of changing records from one medium to another, or from one format to another.

Corporate Records: often referred to as administrative records, are those created by all organizations to support administrative functions, including human resources, general administration, facilities management, financial management, information and information technology management, and equipment and supplies (material) management.

Database: an online tool used to identify articles (or book chapters, dissertations, etc.) on a topic, written by a particular author, in a particular journal, etc.; an electronic version of a print index or abstract.

Destruction: refers to the process of eliminating or deleting records, beyond any possible reconstruction.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): a unique, persistent, managed, international public identifier that is assigned by a publisher when an article is accepted for publication; because this identifier is persistent, it will not change like URLs sometimes do, making it easier to link to online articles.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) system: supports the storage, retrieval and reuse of digital objects within an organization. DAM differs from document management and content management in its focus on multimedia resources, such as images, video and audio. DAM also typically provides rights management capabilities.

Digital Imaging System: automates the creation of electronic versions of paper documents (such as PDFs or TIFFs) and are used as an input to records management systems. By creating electronic resources, they can be manipulated directly by the records system, eliminating the need for physical filing.

Disaster Recovery: any measures instituted to plan for and/ or recover from an event that significantly interrupts normal business operations.

Disposition: the range of processes associated with implementing records retention, destruction or transfer decisions.

Document: recorded information that can be treated as a unit. A document may be stored on paper, disk or any other electronic medium. It may include any combination of text, data, graphics, sound, moving pictures or any other forms of information.

Document Management: the management and control of documents with emphasis on their dynamic and transactional nature including indexing and retrieval, revision and version control, workflow and information content.

Document Type: categorization of documents into mutually exclusive groups to aid the designing of document templates, and hence the capture of metadata at the creation stage in an electronic document or records management system. Its use also aids subsequent retrieval by allowing users to search by document type.

Electronic Records Management System (ERMS): a computer-based facility for managing and controlling records throughout the information life cycle.

Encryption: is the operation by which plain text is modified with an unintelligible, non-exploitable text making it non-retrievable except by authorized users that have the key to bring it back to its original form.

Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS): consists of a core web content management system, with additional capabilities to manage a broader range of organizational information. This often consists of document management, records management, digital asset management or collaboration features.

Enterprise Storage Network (ESN): a networked storage infrastructure that eliminates the barriers between server types, operating systems, storage networking strategies, and data
formats.

File or Folder: a collection of records physically brought together in a recognizable context.

Fileplan: a logical and systematic arrangement of files into subject groups or other categories based on some definite scheme of natural relationships.

Forms: documents with a highly structured layout designed to facilitate the recording of information.

Governance: is the set of responsibilities and practices exercised by executive management with the goal of providing strategic direction, ensuring that objectives are achieved, ascertaining that risks are managed appropriately, and verifying that the enterprise’s resources are used responsibly.

Information Life Cycle: activities involved in managing information throughout its life e.g. information acquisition, creation, retention, storage, retrieval, communication, utilization and destruction.

Information Management (IM): is a program of records and management of information practices instituted to provide an economical and efficient system for the creation, maintenance, retrieval and disposal of records.

Information Protection (IP): is an area of practice focused on the protection of information from inappropriate access or use, using a variety of means as required, including policy and standards; physical and electronic security measures; and compliance monitoring and reporting.

Information Security: is the process of preserving the confidentiality, integrity and availability of information; in addition, other properties such as authenticity, accountability, non-repudiation and reliability can also be involved.

Information Systems: ways of providing human-readable information to users that is relevant to their business objective.

Integrity: is the property of safeguarding the accuracy and completeness of information. Integrity demonstrates that the record is complete and has been unaltered. It is necessary that a record be protected against unauthorized alteration. Records management policies and procedures should specify what additions or annotations may be made to the record after it is created, under what circumstances additions or annotations may be authorized, and who is authorized to make them. Any authorized annotation, addition or deletion to a record should be explicitly indicated and traceable.

Knowledge Management: managing tacit knowledge (held in an individual’s brain in the form of know-how and experience) and explicit knowledge (recorded independently of humans).

Levels of Evidence: not all information is created equal. For example,  research studies provide stronger evidence than does an opinion piece; and a randomized control trial provides stronger evidence than a cohort study. The comparative strength of evidence is described in terms of levels of evidence.

Life Cycle: refers to the stages through which information is managed. Information management strives to manage the records in a manner that facilitates authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability throughout all stages including:

• Planning;
• Creation and organization;
• Receipt and capture of data;
• Retrieval, processing, dissemination and distribution of data;
• Storage, maintenance and protection;
• Archival preservation or destruction or expungement.

Metadata: descriptive data which systematically identifies various attributes of a class of information such as files/folders and documents.

Migration: act of moving records from one system to another, while maintaining the records authenticity, integrity, reliability and usability.

Network Attached Storage (NAS): in contrast to Storage Area Networks, uses file-based protocols such as NFS or SMB/CIFS so the operating system understands that the storage is remote, and requests a portion of an abstract file rather than a disk block.

PDF (Portable Document Format): a commonly used and preferred file format for online journals; when the file is printed, it looks just like the article in the print journal.

Personal Information: means recorded information about an identifiable individual.

Privacy: is the right of individuals to control or influence what information related to them may be collected and stored and by whom; and to whom that information may be disclosed.

Record Type: categorization of records into mutually exclusive groups so that a different management policy (for example retention scheduling or security category) can be applied to each record type. Record types tend to be categorized by the type of content.

Records: any piece of recorded information; an account of a fact or, for example, an opinion in permanent form.

Records Analysis: a records management activity involving appraisal to identify and evaluate records, decide retention schedules and identify vital records.

Records Management: the management and control of an organization’s records regardless of the storage medium.

Records Management System (RMS): information systems which capture, maintain and provide access to records over time’. This includes managing both physical (paper) records and electronic documents.

Restore: the process of bringing information back from a back-up storage media to its original state.

Retention Schedules: prescribed lengths of time for retaining various classes of records; often related to a fileplan.

RSS: acronym for Real Simple Syndication, RSS is a way of sharing regularly updated news and information using a feed; to view RSS feeds, you need an RSS Reader.

RSS Reader: software that organizes and displays RSS feeds for ease of reading. A reader may be stand-alone software, a web site like Bloglines.com, or a browser plug-in. Some email programs have a built-in RSS reader.

Search Strategy: how a search for information is structured. For searches in databases, the search strategy includes the terms used to search, how terms or search sets are combined, how the search is limited, etc.

Set: a single search in a database; complex searches can be developed by combining search sets using Boolean Operators.

Storage Area Network (SAN): is an architecture to attach remote computer storage devices (such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes) to servers in such a way that the devices appear as locally attached to the operating system. Although the cost and complexity of SANs are dropping, they are uncommon outside larger enterprises.

Unstructured Content: any document, file, image, report, form, etc. that has no defined, standard structure that would enable convenient storage in automated processing devices; it cannot be defined in terms of rows and columns or records, and the data cannot be examined with standard access. Unstructured content is audio, email, spreadsheets, video, etc. Some of the most valuable information in an organization resides in unstructured content.

Version Control: managing changes to documents as they are edited, reviewed and finalized and providing an auditable trail of the various versions through which they pass.

Vital Records: business records without which an organization would encounter major operational or legal problems.

Wiki: a web-based resource in which people collaboratively write, edit, correct, and delete information (though some wikis restrict who can do what); the most popular wiki is Wikipedia, a wiki-based online encyclopedia.

Workflow: is a depiction of a sequence of operations, carried out by a person, a group of persons,or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work thus serving as a virtual representation of actual work. The flow being described often refers to a document that is being transferred from one step to another. A workflow is a model for describing a reliably repeatable sequence of operations.