What is Future Proof?
The challenge
Digital records keep government business going. The emails, databases, websites and other forms of digital information made, kept and received by government organisations not only support and enable business operation, but form an important part of government’s collective memory.
But digital records are vulnerable. To be relied upon for business, legal and other purposes digital records need to be meaningful and trustworthy. They must be fixed, inviolate representations of business activity, preserved in context and protected from loss or alteration.
The strategy
State Records’ Future Proof strategy is all about ensuring that digital records are meaningful and trustworthy – so that they can support and enable government business and also record our rights, entitlements and history.
We have adopted a special logo for Future Proof that will identify products and projects from State records that are specifically about digital records. The ‘flying folders’ represent the collection and access aspects of both recordkeeping and archiving in the digital environment.
The projects
The Future Proof strategy consists of two main strands:
- improving digital recordkeeping across government, and
- implementing a digital archiving facility for New South Wales government.
To help public offices to implement better systems for keeping digital records, State Records will develop and issue standards that establish clear minimum requirements for system functionality and metadata, and more detailed specifications to help build or upgrade systems. We will also offer practical advice on records migration and update our suite of guidelines and training to better reflect the challenges of digital recordkeeping.
Without a facility to accept and preserve digital records as State archives, State Records can only partially perform its statutory role. That is why, in 2007, we developed and released a policy statement on the preservation of digital records. Based around the principles in this policy, we have prepared a plan to design and build NSW’s first digital archiving solution.
