A physical record can be anything. In many cases a physical record may be a paper copy of a record but this does not have to be the case. Evidence being held at a police station is an example of a non-paper-based physical record. In this case, the record may be a weapon, a hair sample, a photograph, etc.
In OnBase, we store individual documents. Physical Records may not always follow this model and can often relate to a group of documents or a collection of objects. A record of a court case may contain hundreds of pieces of paper, generated at different times by various parties. All these items go together to form a record of that case.
When asking an end user organization how many records they have, one is often confronted with “How do I define what constitutes a single record?”. The answer depends on how many records you want to uniquely identify. Each item or collection of items that is uniquely identified can be considered a single record.