Records are evidence of business transactions.
Electronic records must be kept reliably and authentically, for the life of the record. Our approach to this problem was to ensure that full capture of the information needed to enable records to be created, stored and accessed occurs as soon as possible. We did this by studying the processs of gouvernment that lead to record creation, as well as the processes that require the use of records. We then modelled a record as a document with an associated set of metadata that fully capture the context of that government document. Having modelled processes and data, we developed a prototype system to demonstrate the capture, storage and delivery of government records by using components that are based on internationnal standards for data interchange.