What is the difference between a records officer and a records liaison or coordinator, and what does each one actually do?

Records officers and records liaisons (often called records coordinators) both keep an organization’s recordkeeping healthy, but they sit at different levels of authority and work at different scales. The simplest way to think about it: the records officer owns the program, while liaisons and coordinators make the program work inside each office, department, or program area.

The Records Officer

A records officer is the senior, accountable owner of the records management program for an entire organization or agency. This is typically a designated, often formal role with enterprise-wide responsibility. Common duties include:

• Setting records policy, procedures, and program direction
• Developing and maintaining retention schedules and disposition authorities
• Serving as the primary point of contact with oversight bodies (in the federal space, that is the National Archives)
• Overseeing training, compliance, audits, and program reporting
• Approving the transfer, permanent preservation, or destruction of records

The records officer answers for whether the program meets legal, regulatory, and policy requirements. They think in terms of the whole organization rather than any single office.

The Records Liaison or Coordinator

A records liaison or coordinator is the local, embedded point person within a specific division, office, or business unit. The role connects the central program to the people who create and handle records every day. Typical responsibilities include:

• Applying retention schedules to the records their unit actually creates
• Helping colleagues file, label, and organize records correctly
• Identifying records eligible for transfer or disposition and flagging exceptions
• Routing questions, holds, and requests back to the records officer
• Reinforcing policy and assisting with training at the local level

Coordinators usually carry this work alongside other job duties and rely on the records officer for authority and direction.

How They Work Together

Think of it as policy versus practice. The records officer defines what must happen across the organization; liaisons and coordinators make sure it happens accurately within each unit, where the records and the institutional knowledge live. Titles vary by organization, and smaller entities may combine these roles, but the division of labor is consistent: one strategic owner, supported by a distributed network of local stewards.

For a broader grounding in program roles and recordkeeping foundations, see our fundamentals topic hub.