Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

Presented: 29 November 2016 In this presentation, Anna Gray provided an overview of the Emergency Digitisation of at Risk Archives’ (EmDARA) project, including the project’s digitisation workflow and some of the project issues encountered. Accompanying presentation: EmDARA (PPT, 3MB)

The following is an insight from the Digital Archives team here at State Records with a fascinating look back at our recent digital history. On 30 June 1992, First State Computing transferred the database that had been used in the recently ended Royal Commission into the Former Chelmsford Private Hospital and Mental Health Services in […]

On the 17th of March we had our Records Managers Forum. State Records NSW uses the forum to share information about key initiatives with our public offices. It is also a place for lively discussion with colleagues from across the government sector. As usual, we have published the podcasts so that those who could not make it on the day […]

Right now, State Records’ Digital Archives team is moving from project to normal operations mode. As part of this transition we are publishing our methodology and procedures, providing public access to digital archives from the pilot projects that are open to public access, and inviting NSW agencies to start contacting us to initiate migration projects. […]

It’s two and a half years into the three year Digital Archives project and we have been working hard on our pilot projects, in particular the records of the Special Commission of Inquiry into Electricity Transactions and records of former State Premiers Carr, Keneally and Rees. Key applications have been developed to support the migration […]

One of the challenges that we (State Records NSW’s digital archives team) have been tackling is how we will approach the migration of database-backed business systems to the digital archives. There are a number of difficulties in preserving databases: many database management systems (particularly those used in government) are proprietary and require licenses to use, so […]

Scientific data, research data, data retention, big data – just recently it seems like everyone is talking about data of one sort or another. Last week CBC News reported a fascinating tale of lost and inaccessible data: ‘The case of the missing data’. In it, a US scientist looking into heart disease tracked down some […]

When State Records started building a whole of government digital archive for New South Wales, we committed to publishing new software developed for the project as free and open source software. We rely heavily on software and web services shared freely by members of the digital preservation community, such as the PRONOM technical registry from the National Archives (UK) and Xena from the National […]

We are currently reviewing our Future Proof blog to improve its structure and navigation and have discovered that, since its inception in 2008, the most commonly searched for terms is ‘EDRMS.’ We have been advising agencies for a number of years about EDRMS and implementation projects. We have published some information about EDRMS on the […]

A couple of weeks ago I went to Future Perfect: Digital preservation by design 2012 organised by Archives New Zealand and held at the national museum, Te Papa, in Wellington. Now in its second year, it’s fantastic to have a digital preservation themed event like this happening in our region – no such event exists, […]