Having decided you need an archive you need a clear understanding of what needs to go into it.

The information that needs to be retained of course depends on the industry. However, certain trends emerge and broad categories can be identified:

• Operational data. Each organisation, be it public or private, records information on its day-to-day operations. This may relate to physical activities such as plant information, laboratory data, or material movements, or intellectual activities, such as decision making, web publication, and communications.
• Incident data. For any significant events, enhanced records need to be retained, including detailed instrument records, internal and public reports and management records.
• Routine business activities. These are the records relating to the running of the business including financial information, email records, quality management systems and internal information sites such as intranets and on-line forums.
• Project data. Any specific projects will have enhanced information that needs retaining including plans, progress and outcomes. This many be technically complex (for example CAD drawings), or be related to other one-off activities that need to be recorded.
• Environmental data. All organisations have an increasing duty to record their environmental impact and for some industries this can be of major importance. This may include assessments, instructions and sample measurements that demonstrate good practice and minimal impact.
• Compliance data. Additional information demonstrating compliance to the many bodies regulating each industry must be retained.
• Human Resource Information. Staff information may be retained relating to attendance, health, management, remuneration and activities. These of course must remain confidential.

One additional complication is that this information may come from many different organisations, be they suppliers, partners, sub-contractors or customers, each of which has different practices, systems and rules. This makes implementing a simple set of rules relating to permitted formats or structures more difficult or even impossible.