Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

photo credit: verlaciudad Last week State Records ran a half day workshop, Managing recordkeeping risk in business systems. We had a fantastic group of participants who really engaged with the topic and brought a whole range of valuable experience to the discussion. The workshop was developed to support implementation of State Records’s Standard on digital […]

photo credit: fo.ol Society today is producing far more information that it has the capacity to store and preserve. The gap between what we create and what will actually have the capacity to keep is also growing exponentially. ‘In fact, the production of digital information has already outstripped global server capacity by an estimated factor […]

photo credit: mikecogh I’ve just finished Outliers, a brilliant book by one of Cassie and my favourite authors, Malcolm Gladwell. (He also wrote The Tipping Point and Blink). Outliers, it says on the cover, is ‘the story of success’. Through the book Gladwell tells the stories of many ‘outliers’, people like Bill Gates, The Beatles […]

photo credit: nothakus In a few days time, on 30 June, it will become a mandatory requirement under the Standard on digital recordkeeping (see Resources section above) that each government organisation must ‘define the digital State records that it will make and keep’ for all of its high risk business processes (requirement 1.1). Our recent […]

photo credit: shaire productions At Future Proof, the digital recordkeeping question that we are most commonly asked at the moment relates to the cloud and recordkeeping. So, on International Archivists Day and @AskArchivists Day, we thought we’d blog about all the cloud-related advice available on our website in case you were interested but too shy to […]

American archivist Elena S Danielson has written a really interesting book called The Ethical Archivist (see description at http://goo.gl/xNRgU). In amongst a range of other fascinating ethical discussions, Danielson asks some probing questions about archival ethics in the digital age. Danielson says that a key collective aim of archival institutions is to ‘cultivate trusted archives based […]

Carol Kaesuk Yoon has written a brilliant book called Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science. It’s about scientific taxonomy – the identification and classification of species – but it has so much to say about the theory and process of classification that I think it raises a lot of fascinating issues for our […]

We think of metadata as a modern concept, a product of the computer age and the online world. But metadata is actually an ancient tool in the world of information management. There is probably some form hieroglyphic metadata in a museum somewhere but, closer to home, an interesting overview of early Australian metadata practices has […]