Glossary

194 records management terms, defined in plain language.

A

Accession: The process by which an archives takes legal and physical custody of records, formally bringing them into its holdings — and the body of records so transferred.
Accretion: Accretion is the ongoing addition of new records to an existing series, collection, or accession that continues to grow over time under the same provenance and disposition rules.
Active Records: Records used frequently in current business and kept close at hand for ready access, typically in office or online systems — the first phase of the records lifecycle's use stage.
Anonymization: Anonymization is the irreversible process of altering or removing personal identifiers from a record so that the individual it describes can no longer be identified, directly or indirectly, by anyone.
Appraisal: The process of evaluating records to determine their value and how long they should be retained, weighing administrative, legal, fiscal, and historical considerations.
Archival Description: The process of creating a structured, standardized representation of archival records — capturing their content, context, structure, and arrangement — so users can identify, understand, and locate the holdings.
Archives: Records of enduring value selected for permanent preservation, or the institution and facility responsible for preserving and providing access to them.
Audit Trail: The system-generated, tamper-evident record of actions taken on a record — who did what, and when — used to prove integrity, chain of custody, and compliance.
Authenticity: The quality of a record being genuinely what it purports to be — created or sent by the person who claims to have done so, at the time claimed — and not forged, altered, or impersonated.
Auto-Classification: Auto-classification is the use of software to automatically assign records to categories in a file plan or classification scheme, applying retention and other metadata without manual human coding of each item.
Auto-Delete Policy: An auto-delete policy is a configured rule that automatically and permanently removes email or messages after a set period, applied uniformly without case-by-case human review.

B

Backfile Conversion: Backfile conversion is the project of digitizing an organization's existing accumulation of paper or other legacy records into electronic images so the inactive backlog can be managed, searched, and retained alongside born-digital content.
Big Bucket Schedule: A retention schedule that groups many record series into a few broad categories ("buckets") sharing one retention period and disposition, instead of scheduling each series individually.
Bit Rot: Bit rot is the gradual, often silent degradation of digital data caused by physical media decay, hardware failure, or uncorrected errors, leaving files corrupted, unreadable, or subtly altered over time.
Bitonal Imaging: Bitonal imaging is a digitization method that captures each pixel of a document as one of only two values—pure black or pure white—producing a high-contrast, low-storage image well suited to clean text and line documents.
Born-Digital: Records created and managed in digital form from the outset, as opposed to records digitized from paper or other analog originals.
Breach Notification: Breach notification is the legally or policy-mandated process of informing affected individuals, oversight authorities, and other stakeholders when personal or sensitive information is exposed, accessed, or disclosed without authorization.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) is a policy allowing employees to conduct work on personal phones, tablets, or computers they own rather than organization-issued equipment.

C

Capstone: NARA's role-based approach to managing email as records — capturing the email accounts of senior officials as permanent records and applying time-based retention to other accounts.
Certificate of Destruction: A document that records evidence that specified records or media were destroyed, capturing what was destroyed, when, by whom, the method used, and the authority under which the destruction was carried out.
Chain of Custody: The documented, unbroken record of who has handled a record and when, used to demonstrate its integrity and authenticity as evidence.
Checksum: A value computed from a file's data used to verify its integrity — recomputing it later detects any change or corruption. The basis of fixity checking in digital preservation.
Classification (National Security): The system of designating information as Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret to protect national security, along with the rules for marking, handling, and eventually declassifying it.
Classification Scheme: A logical, hierarchical structure of categories used to organize records by their business function or subject so that related records can be grouped, retrieved, and managed consistently across a recordkeeping system.
Color Depth: Color depth, or bit depth, is the number of bits used to represent the color of each pixel in a digital image, determining how many distinct colors or shades of gray that image can reproduce.
Conformance and Certification: Conformance and certification is the process of demonstrating, often through formal testing or third-party attestation, that a recordkeeping system or practice meets the requirements of a published standard.
Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI): Unclassified federal information that still requires safeguarding or dissemination controls under law, regulation, or government-wide policy — managed under a standardized NARA-run program.
Controlled Vocabulary: A controlled vocabulary is an authorized, predefined set of standardized terms used to consistently describe, index, and retrieve records, ensuring everyone applies the same words for the same concepts.
Convenience Copy: A convenience copy is a duplicate of a record kept by someone other than the official recordkeeper purely for ease of reference, holding no recordkeeping value and not subject to the official retention schedule.
Custodian: The person or unit responsible for holding and maintaining particular records — and, in e-discovery, an individual whose records may contain information relevant to a matter.
Cutoff: The point at which records are closed off (often the end of a fiscal year or completion of an event) so the retention period can begin to run, allowing disposition in orderly batches.

D

Dark Data: Dark data is information an organization collects, generates, and stores but never analyzes, uses, or even inventories, leaving it unmanaged and often unaccounted for in retention and disposition decisions.
Data Governance: The framework for managing the quality, definitions, ownership, and use of an organization's data — focused on making data accurate and usable, and sitting alongside information governance.
Data Map: A data map is an inventory that documents what information an organization holds, where it lives, how it flows between systems, who owns it, and how it is classified and retained.
Data Minimization: The privacy principle of collecting and retaining only the personal data actually needed, for only as long as needed, to reduce risk and cost.
Data Subject: A data subject is the identified or identifiable living individual to whom personal data relates, giving that person rights over how their information is collected, used, retained, and disposed of.
Data Subject Access Request (DSAR): A Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) is a formal request by an individual to obtain a copy of the personal data an organization holds about them, along with information about how and why that data is processed.
Day-Forward Scanning: Day-forward scanning is the practice of digitizing records from a chosen start date onward as they are created or received, rather than going back to convert the existing paper backlog.
Deaccession: The formal, documented process by which an archives permanently removes material from its holdings — the archival counterpart to disposition, requiring authority and record-keeping.
Defensible Disposition: The practice of destroying or otherwise disposing of records routinely and consistently under documented authority, in a way an organization can prove was proper if later challenged.
Derivative Classification: Derivative classification is the act of incorporating, paraphrasing, restating, or generating in new form information that is already classified, and marking the newly created material to reflect the classification of its source.
Designated Community: A Designated Community is the specific group of people or systems that an archive identifies as the intended users of its preserved records and commits to keeping the information understandable and usable for over time.
Digital Continuity: Digital continuity is the ability to keep digital records usable, accessible, and understandable for exactly as long as they are needed, despite changes in technology, formats, systems, and organizations.
Digital Preservation: The active management of digital records over the long term to keep them authentic, usable, and accessible despite format obsolescence, media decay, and changing technology.
Disposition: The final action taken on a record at the end of its retention period — typically destruction, transfer to an archives, or permanent preservation — carried out under documented authority.
Disposition Authority: The formal approval that authorizes the disposition of a records series — the legal basis permitting records to be destroyed or transferred when their retention period ends.
Distribution List: A distribution list is a single named address that, when used as a recipient, expands to deliver a message to every member it contains, letting a sender reach a defined group without naming each individual.
Document Capture: Document capture is the process of bringing documents into a recordkeeping system by converting paper or born-digital files into managed electronic objects, indexing them with metadata, and registering them as records.
Document Management System (DMS): A Document Management System (DMS) is software that captures, stores, versions, secures, and retrieves an organization's electronic documents, focusing on day-to-day productivity rather than formal records control.
DoD 5015.2-STD (5015.2): The longstanding U.S. Department of Defense standard defining functional requirements for records management software. Once the de facto federal baseline; NARA revoked its endorsement in 2022 in favor of the Universal ERM Requirements.
Downgrading: Downgrading is the formal reduction of a classified record's protection level (for example, from Secret to Confidential) when the original sensitivity has lessened but some protection is still warranted, short of full declassification.
Dublin Core: A widely used standard set of fifteen core metadata elements (title, creator, date, subject, etc.) for describing digital and physical resources in a simple, interoperable way.
Duty to Preserve: The legal obligation to identify, retain, and protect records and other information that are relevant—or reasonably anticipated to be relevant—to actual or foreseeable litigation, investigation, or audit, so they are not altered, lost, or destroyed.

E

E-Discovery (eDiscovery): The process of identifying, preserving, collecting, reviewing, and producing electronically stored information in response to litigation or investigation.
Early Case Assessment: Early Case Assessment is the practice of analyzing the scope, cost, risk, and likely merits of a dispute at its outset by reviewing key documents and data sources before committing to full-scale review or litigation.
Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM): A widely used framework describing the stages of e-discovery — from information governance and identification through preservation, collection, review, and production.
Electronic Records Archives (ERA): Electronic Records Archives (ERA) is the federal system through which agencies electronically schedule, transfer, and preserve their permanent and long-term records in the custody of the National Archives.
Electronic Records Management System (ERMS): Software that captures, classifies, secures, and disposes of electronic records under a retention schedule, while maintaining audit trails and access controls.
Electronically Stored Information (ESI): Any information created, manipulated, or stored in digital form — email, documents, databases, messages, metadata — that may be subject to discovery in litigation.
Email Archiving: Email archiving is the systematic capture, retention, and indexing of email messages and their attachments as records, preserving content and metadata so messages remain authentic, searchable, and disposable on schedule.
Email Continuity: Email continuity is the capability to keep email sending, receiving, and access available during outages or migrations, while preserving the messages and their metadata as authentic, complete records throughout their full retention period.
Emulation: A digital preservation strategy that keeps original files unchanged and instead recreates the software/hardware environment needed to use them, so records behave as they originally did.
Encoded Archival Description (EAD): Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is a standardized XML format for encoding archival finding aids, allowing the hierarchical descriptions of records collections and their context to be shared and searched across institutions.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM): The strategy and software for capturing, managing, storing, and delivering an organization's content (documents, images, web content) — broader than records management, which governs the records subset.
Ephemeral Messaging: Ephemeral messaging refers to electronic communications, often via apps or platforms designed to auto-delete messages after a set time or once read, that disappear by default rather than being retained.
Equities (Declassification): A classifying agency's interest in classified information contained in a record, which must be reviewed and concurred in before that information can be declassified or released.
Event-Based Retention: Event-based retention is a disposition method in which a record's retention period does not begin counting until a specific triggering event occurs, rather than starting on a fixed creation or filing date.
Executive Order 13526: Executive Order 13526 is the December 2009 presidential order governing how U.S. national security information is classified, safeguarded, and declassified, including automatic declassification of most records at 25 years.

F

Federal Electronic Records Modernization Initiative (FERMI): A NARA initiative that standardizes how federal agencies acquire records management services and solutions, supporting the government-wide transition to electronic recordkeeping.
Federal Records Act (FRA): The U.S. law requiring federal agencies to create and preserve records of their activities, run a records management program, and dispose of records only under NARA-approved authority.
File Plan: A classification scheme that organizes an organization's records into categories and links each category to its retention and disposition rules.
Finding Aid: A descriptive tool — such as an inventory, index, or register — that helps users discover, understand, and locate records within an archives' holdings.
Fixity: The property of a digital file remaining unchanged over time, verified using checksums so that any corruption or alteration can be detected.
FOIA Exemption: A FOIA exemption is a legal category under the Freedom of Information Act that allows an agency to withhold all or part of a record from public disclosure to protect interests such as national security, privacy, or law enforcement.
FOIA Library: An agency's online collection of records that must be made publicly available, including frequently requested records and certain documents the law requires to be posted proactively rather than only on individual request.
Foreseeable Harm Standard: A FOIA disclosure principle holding that agencies may withhold records under a discretionary exemption only when they reasonably foresee that release would harm an interest the exemption protects, not merely because the records technically qualify.
Format Migration: A digital preservation strategy that keeps records usable by periodically converting them to current, well-supported file formats as older formats approach obsolescence.
Format Obsolescence: Format obsolescence is the loss of access to a digital record because the file format it was saved in can no longer be opened or correctly rendered by current hardware or software.
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): The U.S. federal law giving the public a right to request access to federal agency records, subject to nine specific exemptions protecting interests such as national security and privacy.
Functional Requirements: Specific, testable statements of what a recordkeeping system or process must do — capture, classify, retain, dispose, secure, and audit records — used to design, procure, and evaluate compliant solutions.

G

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the European Union law that governs how organizations collect, process, store, and dispose of the personal data of individuals in the EU, granting those individuals rights over their data.
General Records Schedule (GRS): Government-wide retention schedules issued by NARA that authorize the disposition of records common to many or all federal agencies, such as administrative and housekeeping records.
Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles (GARP): Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles (GARP) is a framework of eight foundational principles for sound information governance, covering accountability, transparency, integrity, protection, compliance, availability, retention, and disposition of records.
Glomar Response: A Glomar response is an agency's refusal under FOIA to confirm or deny whether requested records even exist, used when acknowledging their existence or nonexistence would itself reveal protected information.
Grayscale Imaging: Grayscale imaging is a digitization method that captures a document as shades of gray, from black to white, preserving tonal detail like shadows, photographs, and faint pencil without recording color.

I

Image Compression: Image compression is the process of reducing the digital file size of a scanned or photographed document image, either without losing data (lossless) or by discarding some visual detail (lossy) to save storage and bandwidth.
Inactive Records: Records no longer needed for day-to-day business but still retained to meet retention requirements, usually moved to lower-cost storage until their disposition date.
Information Asset: An information asset is a defined, managed body of information that an organization recognizes as having value, treats as a unit, and assigns ownership, classification, and handling rules to across its lifecycle.
Information Governance (IG): The organization-wide framework of policies, roles, accountability, and controls for managing all information as a strategic asset — uniting records, privacy, security, and e-discovery.
Information Governance Reference Model (IGRM): A widely used framework that depicts how information governance unites the stakeholders and disciplines — business, legal, RIM, IT, privacy/security — across the information lifecycle.
Ingest: Ingest is the process of accepting records or digital objects into a repository or archive, validating them, and preparing them for long-term storage, management, and preservation.
Instant Messaging (IM): Real-time, text-based electronic communication that exchanges short messages between users over a network, often producing content that qualifies as a record subject to retention and disposition.
Integrity: Integrity is the quality of a record being complete, unaltered, and protected from unauthorized or undocumented change, so it remains a trustworthy reflection of the activity it documents.
Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP): The independent U.S. government panel that decides appeals over classification and declassification, including mandatory declassification review denials and agency classification challenges.
ISO 15489: The principal international standard for records management, setting out the core concepts, principles, and good practices for creating, capturing, and managing authentic, reliable records regardless of format.
ISO 16175: The international standard setting out principles and functional requirements for managing records in digital environments, complementing the principles-based ISO 15489.
ISO 16363: ISO 16363 is an international standard that defines criteria for auditing and certifying whether a digital repository is trustworthy enough to preserve digital records over the long term.
ISO 23081 Records Metadata: ISO 23081 is the international standard that specifies the principles and types of metadata needed to create, manage, and sustain records over time, so they remain authentic, reliable, usable, and findable.
ISO 30300: ISO 30300 is the international standard that establishes the fundamentals and vocabulary for a Management System for Records (MSR), applying a management-system framework to records management much like ISO 9001 does for quality.

J

Journaling: Journaling is the server-side practice of automatically capturing a complete, unaltered copy of every email message as it is sent or received, preserving it independently of the user's mailbox.

K

Key Performance Indicator (KPI): A Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a quantifiable metric used to measure how well a records management program meets defined objectives such as compliance, timely disposition, and accessibility against an agreed target.
Knowledge Management: The discipline of capturing, organizing, sharing, and reusing an organization's collective knowledge — both documented information and the tacit expertise in people's heads — so it stays accessible and useful over time.

L

Legal Hold: A legal hold is a directive that suspends the normal disposition of records and other information relevant to anticipated or pending litigation, investigation, or audit, requiring that those materials be preserved unaltered.
Litigation Hold: A directive that suspends the normal disposition of records relevant to anticipated or active litigation, investigation, or audit, requiring them to be preserved until the matter is resolved.

M

Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR): A process under EO 13526 allowing any person to request that an agency review a specific classified record for declassification and release whatever no longer needs protection.
Maturity Model: A structured framework that describes successive stages of capability—from ad hoc to fully optimized—so an organization can assess how developed its records and information governance practices are and chart a path to improvement.
Meet and Confer: A pretrial conference where opposing parties confer, often early in litigation, to discuss the scope, preservation, format, and exchange of electronically stored information and resolve discovery issues before involving the court.
Metadata: Structured information that describes a record — who created it, when, in what context, and how it relates to other records — enabling the record to be found, understood, and trusted over time.
Mobile Device Management (MDM): Mobile Device Management (MDM) is software that lets an organization centrally configure, secure, monitor, and remotely wipe smartphones and tablets, including those used to create or hold official records.
MoReq: MoReq (Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records) is a European model specification defining functional requirements for systems that capture, manage, and preserve electronic records over time.

N

NARA Bulletin: A NARA Bulletin is official guidance issued by the National Archives and Records Administration that interprets federal records-management regulations and instructs agencies on how to apply recordkeeping requirements.
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA): The U.S. federal agency responsible for preserving government records of enduring value and for overseeing records management across the federal government.
National Declassification Center (NDC): The center at the U.S. National Archives that coordinates and streamlines the declassification of permanently valuable classified federal records.
Non-record: Information or materials that do not meet the definition of a record — such as convenience copies, drafts, blank forms, and published reference material — and so are not subject to records retention requirements.
Normalization: Normalization is the process of converting electronic records and their metadata into standardized, well-documented formats and structures so they can be reliably preserved, accessed, and migrated over time regardless of the originating system.

O

OAIS Reference Model (ISO 14721): An ISO standard (ISO 14721) describing the functions, responsibilities, and information model an Open Archival Information System needs to preserve digital objects and keep them accessible and understandable to a designated community over the long term.
Off-Channel Communication: Off-channel communication is business-related messaging conducted on personal accounts, devices, or unapproved apps outside an organization's official, captured systems, often evading recordkeeping and retention controls.
Office of Government Information Services (OGIS): The U.S. federal office, located within the National Archives and Records Administration, that serves as the FOIA Ombudsman by mediating disputes between requesters and agencies and reviewing agency FOIA compliance.
OMB/NARA Memorandum M-19-21 (M-19-21): The 2019 federal directive requiring agencies to transition to fully electronic recordkeeping and electronic transfer of permanent records to NARA; updated by M-23-07.
OMB/NARA Memorandum M-23-07 (M-23-07): M-23-07 is a 2023 joint OMB and NARA memorandum directing U.S. federal agencies to transition fully to electronic records, requiring permanent records be transferred to the National Archives in digital formats with appropriate metadata.
Open Archival Information System (OAIS): An ISO reference model (ISO 14721) describing the functions and information an archive needs to preserve digital content over the long term and make it accessible to its users.
Open Format: An open format is a file format whose technical specification is published and freely usable, allowing records to be read, rendered, and migrated over time without dependence on a single proprietary product or vendor.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR): Technology that converts the image of text in a scanned document into machine-readable characters, making digitized records searchable and reusable.
Original Classification Authority (OCA): An Original Classification Authority (OCA) is an official authorized in writing to make the initial determination that information requires protection because its unauthorized disclosure could damage national security.
Original Order: The archival principle of maintaining records in the arrangement given to them by their creator, preserving context and evidential value.

P

PDF/A: PDF/A is an ISO-standardized version of the PDF format designed for long-term archiving, requiring that everything needed to render a document faithfully be embedded inside the file itself.
Permanent Records: Records appraised as having enduring value — historical, legal, or evidential — that are preserved indefinitely rather than destroyed, and (in government) transferred to an archives.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII): Any information that can identify a specific individual, alone or combined with other data — requiring heightened protection and careful retention.
Portion Marking: Portion marking is the practice of labeling each individual section of a classified or controlled document—paragraphs, titles, bullets, captions—with its own classification or control level so readers can see exactly which parts are sensitive.
PREMIS: The de facto international standard for preservation metadata — the technical, provenance, fixity, and rights information needed to keep digital objects usable and trustworthy over time.
Presidential Records Act (PRA): The U.S. law establishing that the official records of the President and Vice President are public property, managed and preserved by NARA and ultimately released to the public.
Privacy Act of 1974: The U.S. law governing how federal agencies collect, maintain, use, and disclose records about individuals, and granting people rights to access and amend their records.
Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA): A Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) is a structured analysis that identifies and evaluates how a system, process, or records collection gathers, uses, stores, shares, and disposes of personally identifiable information, and documents the controls that mitigate privacy risks.
Proactive Disclosure: The practice of an agency affirmatively publishing records the public is likely to want, on its own initiative, rather than waiting for individual access requests to be filed.
Proportionality: Proportionality is the governance principle that the effort, cost, and scope of managing, preserving, searching, or producing records should be reasonably balanced against their value, risk, and the stakes of the matter at hand.
Proprietary Format: A proprietary format is a file or data structure whose specification is owned and controlled by a single party, often undocumented or restricted, so that reliably reading it depends on specific software rather than an open public standard.
Provenance: The origin and chain of ownership/custody of records — who created them and how they have been maintained over time — a core principle for establishing authenticity.
Pseudonymization: Pseudonymization is a privacy technique that replaces direct identifiers in a record with artificial identifiers or tokens, so individuals cannot be identified without separately held additional information.

Q

Quality Assurance Sampling: A documented method of inspecting a representative subset of scanned images against the originals to confirm the whole digitization batch meets accuracy, completeness, and image-quality standards.
Quality Control: The systematic inspection of digitized images and their metadata against defined standards to confirm each scan is complete, legible, accurate, and properly indexed before it is accepted as a usable record.

R

Record: Recorded information, in any form or medium, created or received by an organization in the course of business and kept as evidence of its activities, decisions, and obligations.
Record Copy: Record copy is the single official version of a record designated as the authoritative source for legal, business, and archival purposes, governing retention and disposition while other instances are treated as nonrecord copies.
Record Group: An archival unit grouping the records of a single agency or major organizational entity, used to arrange and describe holdings while preserving their provenance.
Recordkeeping Requirement: A recordkeeping requirement is a rule — from law, regulation, policy, standard, or operational need — that obliges an organization to create, capture, retain, protect, or dispose of specific records in a defined way.
Recordkeeping System: The combination of people, policies, processes, and technology that captures and manages records as trustworthy evidence over time — broader than any single software application.
Records Center: A facility (or service) for the low-cost storage of inactive records during their retention period, providing controlled storage, retrieval, and scheduled disposition.
Records Continuum: A model that views recordkeeping as a continuous, integrated process rather than a series of separate lifecycle stages, emphasizing that records serve current and future purposes simultaneously.
Records Disposition Authority: A Records Disposition Authority is the formal legal approval that authorizes a federal agency to either destroy temporary records or transfer permanent records to the national archives, defining how long each record series must be kept.
Records Inventory: A systematic survey of the records an organization holds — what they are, where they live, in what format and volume, and who owns them — and the foundation of a retention schedule.
Records Liaison: A person within a business unit, office, or program who serves as the local point of contact for records management — coordinating with the records officer and helping colleagues create, file, and dispose of records correctly.
Records Management (RM): The discipline of controlling records throughout their lifecycle — creation, use, maintenance, and disposition — to ensure they are authentic, findable, properly retained, and defensibly disposed of.
Records Management Application (RMA): A software application or system designed to manage records throughout their lifecycle — declaring, classifying, retaining, and disposing of them under a retention schedule while maintaining metadata, access controls, and audit trails.
Records Management Self-Assessment: A records management self-assessment is a structured, periodic review in which an organization evaluates its own recordkeeping practices against applicable laws, policies, and standards to gauge program maturity and identify compliance gaps.
Records Officer (RMO): The person responsible for leading an organization's records management program — developing schedules and policy, training staff, and coordinating disposition and oversight.
Records Series: A group of related records that are used and filed as a unit and share a common retention period — the basic building block of a records inventory and retention schedule.
Redaction: The process of permanently removing or obscuring exempt or sensitive information from a record before it is released, while disclosing the remaining content.
Referral: The act of routing a classified record to another agency that originated some of its information so that agency can review its own equity before the record is declassified or released.
Refreshing: Refreshing is the digital preservation practice of copying records bit-for-bit from aging or obsolete storage media onto new media, so the data survives even as the physical carriers degrade or become unreadable.
Reliability: Reliability is the degree to which a record can be trusted as an accurate and complete representation of the facts or transaction it documents, based on the competence of its author and the rigor of the process that created it.
Resolution (DPI): Resolution (DPI) is the measure of detail captured when scanning a document, expressed as dots per inch, indicating how many distinct points the imaging device records across each linear inch of the original.
Retention Period: The length of time a records series must be kept before disposition, set by legal, fiscal, and operational requirements and measured from a defined trigger event.
Retention Schedule (RRS): The authoritative document that lists an organization's record types and specifies how long each must be retained and what final disposition action applies when that period ends.
Retention Tag: A retention tag is a label applied to email, messages, or folders that links each item to a specific retention period and disposition action, telling the system how long to keep the item and what to do when that period expires.
Right to Erasure: A data-subject privacy right, prominent in the EU GDPR and sometimes called the "right to be forgotten," to have an organization delete personal data about them once it is no longer lawfully needed.
ROT (Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial) (ROT): Data with no business, legal, or historical value — duplicate, expired, or trivial content — that inflates storage cost and risk and should be defensibly cleaned up.

S

Searchable PDF: A Searchable PDF is a digital document that pairs a page image with a hidden, machine-readable text layer (usually produced by OCR), letting users find and retrieve content by keyword rather than only viewing the picture.
Secure Destruction: Secure destruction is the controlled, irreversible elimination of records and their media at the end of an authorized retention period so that the information cannot be reconstructed, recovered, or read by any party.
Security Classification Guide: A Security Classification Guide is an authoritative document, issued by an original classification authority, that records what specific information about a program or system is classified, at what level, for how long, and the basis for that decision.
Segregability: Segregability is the principle that, when part of a record is exempt from disclosure, an agency must release any reasonably separable nonexempt portions rather than withholding the entire record.
Senior Agency Official for Records Management (SAORM): The senior official each U.S. federal agency must designate to oversee its records management program and ensure compliance with federal recordkeeping requirements.
Sensitive PII: A subset of personally identifiable information whose loss or unauthorized disclosure could cause an individual substantial harm, embarrassment, or unfairness, warranting heightened safeguards.
SF-115 (SF-115): SF-115, the Request for Records Disposition Authority, is the standard form U.S. federal agencies submit to NARA to obtain legal authority to destroy or permanently transfer their records.
Significant Properties: Significant properties are the characteristics of a digital record that must be preserved over time to keep it authentic, understandable, and usable for its intended purpose.
Spoliation: The destruction, alteration, or failure to preserve records relevant to anticipated or active litigation — a serious legal failing that can bring court sanctions.
Submission Information Package (SIP): A Submission Information Package (SIP) is the bundle of content and metadata that a producer delivers to a digital archive, packaged so the archive can validate it and begin preparing it for long-term preservation.
Subseries: A subseries is a subordinate grouping of records nested within a larger series, sharing the same function but separated by a distinguishing characteristic such as format, subject, time period, or filing arrangement.
System of Record (SOR): The authoritative system or location designated as holding the official record copy of a given type of information, so other copies can be treated as convenience copies.
System of Records Notice (SORN): A System of Records Notice (SORN) is a public notice an agency must publish describing a recordkeeping system that retrieves information about individuals by name or other personal identifier, including what data it holds, why, and how it is used and shared.
Systematic Declassification Review: Systematic Declassification Review is the planned, agency-driven examination of permanently valuable classified records, on a fixed time schedule, to determine which can be declassified and released without waiting for a public request.

T

Taxonomy: A controlled, hierarchical classification scheme used to organize records and information into consistent categories, supporting findability and consistent retention.
Technology-Assisted Review (TAR): Technology-Assisted Review (TAR) is the use of machine-learning software, trained by human reviewers, to rank or classify large volumes of electronic documents by likely relevance so that review effort can be prioritized or reduced.
Temporary Records: Records approved for destruction after a specified retention period because they lack enduring value — the large majority of all records.
Thesaurus: A controlled vocabulary that defines preferred terms and maps their relationships (broader, narrower, related, and synonyms) so records and information are described and retrieved consistently.
TIFF: TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) is a flexible raster image file format that stores high-quality, often lossless, bitmap images and rich descriptive tags, widely used for archival scanning of paper records.
Time-Based Retention: Time-based retention is a disposition rule that keeps a record for a fixed period measured from a defined starting point, such as creation, closure, or a fiscal year, after which the record becomes eligible for disposal or transfer.
Transfer: Moving records from one location or custodian to another — for example, from an agency to an archives for permanent preservation, or to off-site storage for inactive records.
Transitory Email: Transitory email is a message of short-term, fleeting value that documents no significant business action and may be disposed of once its brief purpose is served, even if it technically meets the definition of a record.
Transitory Record: A record of such short-term, routine usefulness that it can be destroyed almost immediately once it has served its brief purpose, with little or no retention required.
Trusted Digital Repository (TDR): A digital archive whose mission, practices, and infrastructure are demonstrably reliable for preserving and providing long-term access to digital records, often assessed against the OAIS model.

U

Universal Electronic Records Management Requirements (Universal ERM Requirements): NARA's modern, technology-neutral set of requirements for electronic records management solutions, established under FERMI — the current federal reference that superseded NARA's endorsement of DoD 5015.2.
Usability: Usability is the quality of a record that lets you locate, retrieve, present, and interpret it whenever needed, ensuring it remains findable and meaningful for as long as it must be kept.

V

Vaughn Index: A Vaughn Index is an itemized document that an agency prepares during Freedom of Information Act litigation, describing each record or portion it withheld and the specific exemption justifying each withholding, without revealing the protected content.
Vital Records: The small subset of records an organization needs to resume operations after an emergency and to protect its legal and financial rights — protected through duplication and dispersal.

W

Write Once Read Many (WORM): Write Once Read Many (WORM) is a data storage method that lets information be written to a medium a single time and then read back indefinitely without being altered, overwritten, or erased.