A record that denotes the beginning of a series of records and describes the contents of the records that follow. For example, the International Financial Statistics has a header record which describes a time series and the header record is followed by a number of records which contain the actual time series. Header records are often used when the number of physical records needed to contain the data for a particular variable is not constant for all variables. For instance, in economic time series data files one variable might be a time series that contain 20 years of data and fill 20 physical records while the next variable might contain a time series with only 5 years of data and fill only 5 physical records. The use of a file format that includes header records enables one to determine where the series begin and end.

This definition is in context to Computing and Social Science. See more contextual defintions for Header Record.