Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

If your organisation is: pushing business information through social media channels receiving business-related communications through social media building an official business presence in any social media system then your organisation has legal (including under the State Records Act) and business requirements to be able to account for the business it is transacting via social media. […]

A key way of knowing what information management strategy you should deploy for your social media is by identifying the legal requirements that outline how long your specific social media records need to be kept. If your information only needs to be kept for short periods of time, your information management requirements will be quite minimal. If […]

Here are a whole host of questions we have received about managing social media information. We will continue to add to this list of FAQs as people ask us more interesting social media questions. 1. How do I determine what records from my organisation’s social media activities need to be retained? 2. My IT manager says […]

As social media is relatively new and rapidly evolving technology, there are no defined, best practice ways for making and keeping social media records. Organisations also use different social media channels, in a variety of different ways and for various different types of business operations. Given there are no easy answers for how you should […]

As 2013 heats up, Emma and I have been looking over the 2012 Future Proof blog statistics to identify what topics were of particular interest to our Future Proof community. The Top 10 of Future Proof in 2012 is an interesting list and it is providing us with really useful input into our workplanning for the […]

Here are some of the really interesting digital recordkeeping enquiries that the Government Recordkeeping section at State Records received in December. We are using a cloud-based business system but need to export key records out of it and back into corporate business systems. What do we do with the copies of records of these records that […]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dibytes/5935427993/ Last month we reported that backup systems are not recordkeeping systems. Since then, our excellent colleagues at the Public Record Office of Victoria have developed an Issues Paper, Use of Back-up Technology to Archive (comments due 31 December). Their Issues Paper states that the use of backup technologies to archive data will not meet the […]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/webatelier/5929855686/ Janet Knight and I were having a conversation the other day about what it is that recordkeeping systems are supposed to do. We were asking what are the functional requirements for recordkeeping that should be incorporated into business system design or development to support recordkeeping, or used to assess business systems from a recordkeeping perspective. […]

State Records staff were asked these key digital recordkeeping questions in November: Is a scanned signature legally admissible? Are scanned records legally admissible? What are the 5 most compelling arguments I can use to explain why storing records in file shares on the IT network is not a good idea? What type of information fields […]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mathoov/5281019294/ Each year State Records issues a newsletter, Future Proof, to all Chief Executives across the NSW public sector. This year the newsletter is focussed on communicating the idea that recordkeeping is not red tape, it is actually a business enabler. The newsletter says that digital information is a business asset that needs to be built to […]