Records Continuum Model

The Records Continuum Model (RCM) was created in the 1990s by Monash University academic Frank Upward with input from colleagues Sue McKemmish and Livia Iacovino as a response to evolving discussions about the challenges of managing digital records and archives in the discipline of Archival Science. The RCM was first published in Upward’s 1996 paper "Structuring the Records Continuum – Part One: Postcustodial principles and properties". Upward describes the RCM within the broad context of a continuum where activities and interactions transform documents into records, evidence and memory that are used for multiple purposes over time. Upward places the RCM within a post-custodial, postmodern and structuration conceptual framework. Australian academics and practitioners continue to explore, develop and extend the RCM and records continuum theory, along with international collaborators, via the Records Continuum Research Group (RCRG) at Monash University.

The RCM is an abstract conceptual model that helps to understand and explore recordkeeping activities (as interaction) in relation to multiple contexts over space and time (spacetime). Recordkeeping activities take place from before the records are created by identifying recordkeeping requirements in policies, systems, organizations, processes, laws, social mandates that impact on what is created and how it is managed over spacetime. In a continuum, recordkeeping processes, such as adding metadata, fix documents so that they can be managed as evidence. Those records deemed as having continuing value are retained and managed as an archive. The implication of an RCM approach to records and archives is that systems and processes can be designed and put in place before records are even created. A continuum approach therefore highlights that records are both current and archival at the point of creation.

The RCM is represented as a series of concentric rings (dimensions of Create, Capture, Organize and Pluralize) and crossed axes (transactionality, evidentiality, recordkeeping and identity) with each axis labelled with a description of the activity or interaction that occurs at that intersection. Create, Capture, Organize and Pluralize represent recordkeeping activities that occur within spacetime. Activities that occur in these dimensions across the axes are explained in the table below:

...
Wikipedia