What is the records officer's role in a digitization project versus the IT department's?

A successful digitization project depends on two roles working in partnership: the records officer owns the records questions, and the IT department owns the systems questions. Confusing the two is one of the most common reasons digitization efforts stall or produce images no one can trust as evidence.

What the records officer owns

The records officer is accountable for the recordkeeping outcome — not the hardware. This role typically:

• Decides which records are eligible to digitize and which must stay in original form for legal, archival, or preservation reasons.
• Confirms retention and disposition, so scanned records (and any source originals) are kept and destroyed according to an approved schedule.
• Defines metadata, indexing, and naming rules so digitized records remain findable, complete, and properly classified.
• Establishes quality and authenticity requirements — image standards, completeness checks, and the controls that let a scan stand in for the original.
• Documents the process so the digitized records remain trustworthy and defensible for audits, FOIA, or litigation.

In short, the records officer answers: Is this a record, how long do we keep it, and will the digital version hold up?

What the IT department owns

IT delivers the technical environment that carries out the records officer’s requirements. This role generally:

• Provides and maintains scanning equipment, capture software, and storage infrastructure.
• Implements security, access controls, and backups to protect the records.
• Configures the repository or content system so it enforces the metadata, retention, and classification rules the records officer defined.
• Plans for integrity and migration — checksums, format sustainability, and moving content forward as technology changes.

IT answers: How do we capture, store, secure, and sustain these files reliably at scale?

Where they meet

The two roles overlap at requirements. The records officer specifies what the system must do to preserve evidential value; IT determines how to build it. Quality benchmarks (such as resolution and color targets) are best set jointly, drawing on recognized digitization and digital-recordkeeping standards. Legal, privacy, and security stakeholders should be included early.

For a fuller picture of planning and standards, see the digitization and imaging hub.

Clear role boundaries — records value to the records officer, technical execution to IT — keep a digitization project on schedule and the resulting records defensible.