It's probably not material to anything you wrote, but "keep" here is surely not the same meaning in "keep the change" or "keep one copy, chuck the rest". The meaning here is like "protect", "take care of", "look after". I think in modern English this meaning only shows up in phrases related to professions: book keeping, zoo keeping, record keeping... Eddie Izzard plays on these two meanings in a sketch about an aspiring bee keeper: "I want to keep bees! I'll put a piece of string around them so they can't get away!"
Anyway, I bothered to write about the above not to quibble about etymology (not just) but because I regularly use those alternatives above, most often "protect". In my experience people very easily get the idea of protecting information that's in their care, and that is usually what I would mean if I were asking them to be good record keepers. I also find "protect" helpful because it can be used to encompass information security and privacy-related requirements. Perhaps a bit of a wider scope than what people think of if they think about keeping records.
On the other hand, a word like "protect" does not explicitly cover creating records in the first place, but "create" is a clear, every day verb and no great harm in saying this as two points: you need to make records of what you've done and you need to protect the records in your care.
Create is equally good. I just think we need something that's active that lets us talk about why you would create or make a record. We have some implicit idea about why an organisation would protect them and "keep" them - but people have stopped thinking about what they do every day as keeping records, and they've stopped thinking about keeping records as something that they do to organise their work and the work they do with colleagues.
It's not etymology that I'm worried about, it's semantics and semiotics.
It's probably not material to anything you wrote, but "keep" here is surely not the same meaning in "keep the change" or "keep one copy, chuck the rest". The meaning here is like "protect", "take care of", "look after". I think in modern English this meaning only shows up in phrases related to professions: book keeping, zoo keeping, record keeping... Eddie Izzard plays on these two meanings in a sketch about an aspiring bee keeper: "I want to keep bees! I'll put a piece of string around them so they can't get away!"
Anyway, I bothered to write about the above not to quibble about etymology (not just) but because I regularly use those alternatives above, most often "protect". In my experience people very easily get the idea of protecting information that's in their care, and that is usually what I would mean if I were asking them to be good record keepers. I also find "protect" helpful because it can be used to encompass information security and privacy-related requirements. Perhaps a bit of a wider scope than what people think of if they think about keeping records.
On the other hand, a word like "protect" does not explicitly cover creating records in the first place, but "create" is a clear, every day verb and no great harm in saying this as two points: you need to make records of what you've done and you need to protect the records in your care.
Create is equally good. I just think we need something that's active that lets us talk about why you would create or make a record. We have some implicit idea about why an organisation would protect them and "keep" them - but people have stopped thinking about what they do every day as keeping records, and they've stopped thinking about keeping records as something that they do to organise their work and the work they do with colleagues.
It's not etymology that I'm worried about, it's semantics and semiotics.