Victorian Electronic Records Strategy


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

3.3 Record VEOs

A Record VEO is the most common VEO and contains one electronic record. In VERS, an electronic record consists of one or more Documents, each of which consists of one or more Encodings.

A Document is an independent portion of record. An example of this would be the record of a meeting (below) which consists of two documents: the minutes and a presentation given at the meeting

Figure 3. Example of a record that contains multiple Documents and Encodings.

An Encoding is a physical representation of a Document. In the diagram above, the minutes are represented twice: once as a PDF file and once as a Word file. The presentation, however, is only represented by one Encoding (in PDF).

VERS does not require that a recordkeeping system must support multiple Documents within a record (the VERS standard must support all recordkeeping systems, including those which do support multiple Documents in a record). Even if the recordkeeping system does support multiple Documents in a record, the decision as to whether to use this functionality is up to an agency and, potentially, to individual users within the organisation.

Similarly, VERS does not require that a recordkeeping system must support multiple Encodings for each Document. A VERS-compliant recordkeeping system may only allow a Document to have one physical representation.

Figure 4. Main structural elements of a Record VEO.

A Record VEO contains all of the information associated with one record. The VEO contains all of the Documents and all of the Encodings associated with one record. The broad structure of a Record VEO is shown in Figure 4. The elements are:

Record Metadata. The Record Metadata (M11) element describes the record as a whole. Primarily, this encompasses what the record is, how it relates to other records, and its history. This metadata is described in PROS 99/007 Specification 2: VERS Metadata Scheme, and a discussion on the use of this metadata can be found in Advice 11.
Document. The Document (M114) element contains a single Document within a record and may be repeated. A Document contains:

Document Metadata. This element (M115) contains metadata that describes the Document, that is, information that distinguishes this Document from other Documents and from the record as a whole. Again, this metadata is described in PROS 99/007 Specification 2: VERS Metadata Scheme, and a discussion on the use of this metadata can be found in Advice 11.
Encoding. This element (M126) contains a representation of the Document, for example a PDF file or a Word file. A Document may have multiple Encodings. An Encoding contains:

Encoding Metadata. This element (M127) describes the file format. Again, this metadata is described in PROS 99/007 Specification 2: VERS Metadata Scheme, and a discussion on the use of this metadata can be found in Advice 11.
Document Data. This element (M127) contains the actual physical representation of the Document.

The contents and structure of records, Documents and Encodings are largely unchanged from Version 1. However, one change from Version 1 is the ability to structure Documents within a record. This feature is described in the next section.

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