Victorian Electronic Records Strategy


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Standard
(Version 2)
  Specification 1
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  Specification 4
  Specification 5
  Advice 9
  Advice 10
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  Advice 12
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  Advice 14

Home > Standard > Standard (Version 2) > Advice 12 > File VEOs

3.2 File VEOs

File VEOs contain the information associated with a recordkeeping folder (i.e. file) ¹.

In the paper world, a folder contains a sequence of related records; therefore in VERS each Record VEO is expected to be associated with a File VEO. File VEOs may contain descriptive information not present in the individual records.

Figure 2. Top level elements of a File VEO.

The contents of a File VEO are:

File Metadata. The File Metadata (M143) element contains metadata describing the folder; this is largely identical to the record level metadata of a Record VEO. The File Metadata is defined in PROS 99/007 Specification 2: VERS Metadata Scheme) and a discussion can be found in Advice 11.
File Disposal. The File Disposal (M145) element contains information about the disposal of a folder (and the records it contains) and will only be present if the folder has, in fact, been disposed of. The File Disposal metadata is defined in PROS 99/007 Specification 2: VERS Metadata Scheme) and a discussion can be found in Advice 11.

Two examples of File VEOs are given in section 7.

File VEOs are designed to be used for exchanging information between two recordkeeping systems and could not be modified in Version 1. In Version 2, however, the contents of a File VEO may be modified using the Modified VEO (see section 3.5).

It should be noted that File VEOs do not physically contain the Record VEOs contained in the folder. Instead, the Record VEOs are implicitly linked to the File VEO by means of the VEO Identifier (M99) element. Each Record VEO is linked to the folders on which it is filed by means of the File Identifier (M102) element within the VEO Identifier (M99).

¹ 'File' is the traditional recordkeeping term. Since Version 1 of VERS was released, PROV has come to prefer the term 'folder' as this avoids confusion between computer files and recordkeeping files. Unfortunately, the VEO was named before it was recognised that it was necessary to make this distinction.

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