Registering and searching for records in electronic records management systems

Records are increasingly becoming electronic. Both public and private organizations are more and more making information and records only available to their employees, customers and constituents on such a format. Electronic Records Management Systems (ERMS) are, therefore, increasingly being implemented to manage the records of many organizations.The purpose of this research paper was to examine the use of ERMS in organizations in Iceland. It identifies which records by form or type, either created in-house or received, are captured into ERMS. The methods of registering records into ERMS, the registration parameters, are identified as well as the search parameters, the methods of searching for records in the ERMS.Other findings are that the capturing of records is not the distributed effort that the systems are designed for. Records mangers are often responsible for capturing records of others and sometimes carry the total burden as for incoming facsimile messages. Several forms and types of records do not find their way into the system. E-mail is the record form that most employees neglected to capture into ERMS. It neither became a part of the file for paper records. The absence of e-mail in the records collection leaves a huge gap in the memory of many organizations today.