I’ve just having some thoughts as to the difference between what is possible to record, what is recorded, what is regarded as being a record. I think that the first two are simple, in their way, because although people may regard much as being impossible to record, it in many ways certainly is (e.g., the fact that you logged into your email account from a certain location, demonstrated by server logs, or by email marked as read at a certain time, etc.). This is not problematic for me, at least not in terms of my research, because such records are, by definition, outside the scope of my project (except in those rare instances of purposeful, illegal destruction of records, which I think I can dismiss out of hand).
Of more concern to my research is the difference between what is merely recorded and what is perceived as being a record. The mere fact that something exists somewhere as a piece of information does not automatically impart the special significance of record; that status is something which indicates a certain standing in the eyes of the person for whom it counts as a record. I think that, for most people, there is no hard boundary: there is merely the fact that there exists some recorded information which describes such-and-such as having happened, but they do not automatically privilege or classify that bit of information as to whether it may be regarded as a record. Record is a vague term, then, to most people; it is not subject to formal logical operations (is not likely to be thought of in terms of reductio, in the manner of other sorites questions) and does not invoke a decision-tree of any special sort.
Much of lay records management practice is probably not concerned with records as such. Rather, it is concerned with many different classes of thing, all of which may fall into a number of different domains: e.g., “files about our taxes,” or “pictures of our home remodel, when we found that asbestos in the attic.” These are not thought about in records-management terms, but as their own sorts of things, each of which may trigger various intuitions or not (depending upon the legal-mindedness of their possessor perhaps).