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 15489 is the foundational international standard for records management, published by the International Organization for Standardization. It is deliberately principles-based rather than prescriptive: instead of mandating particular software features, it describes what good recordkeeping looks like and the characteristics every record should have — authenticity, reliability, integrity, and usability — so that records can be trusted as evidence of business activity.
The standard frames records management as a systematic program covering the creation and capture of records, their classification against a controlled scheme, the metadata that gives them context, retention and disposition decisions, and ongoing access and protection. Its value is that it applies to any organization, sector, or jurisdiction and to records in any format, from paper to born-digital.
Think of it as the conceptual layer beneath more concrete standards. Where ISO 15489 says records must be reliably retained and disposed of, a functional-requirements standard like ISO 16175 specifies what a system must actually do to make that happen.