Born-Digital
Records created and managed in digital form from the outset, as opposed to records digitized from paper or other analog originals.
Born-digital describes records that originate in digital form — email, office documents, database entries, instant messages, digital photos — as distinct from records that began as paper or other analog material and were later digitized. The overwhelming majority of records created today are born-digital.
The term matters because born-digital records carry distinct management challenges from the start: they depend on software and formats that change over time (raising format obsolescence risk), they’re easily duplicated, and they require metadata captured at creation to remain trustworthy. They also can’t fall back on a paper “original” — the digital object is the record, so its integrity and continuity must be actively maintained. Recognizing records as born-digital underscores why capture, classification, and preservation need to happen in the digital environment itself rather than by printing and filing.