Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

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 […]

As usual, Government Recordkeeping staff have been asked lots of interesting questions about digital information management and recordkeeping issues in March and April. Here is a sample of some of these questions and our responses.

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/forresto/8956688/ We have been having some really interesting conversations with a  range of organisations about their business systems and the types of records they are making and keeping about their business systems.

Here are some of the interesting questions we were asked in January and February about a whole host of digital recordkeeping issues. If you have any feedback for us on our advice, please don’t hesitate to let us know. How can I apply metadata to social media records? We used the government’s online recruitment tool Taleo […]

Last month, Kate Cumming and I met with Melissa Ratkun, Claude Wetsteyn and Anita Franjieh from Bankstown City Council to talk about Council’s SharePoint pilot project and see a demo of some of the functionality implemented. In 2012, Council ran a pilot project to test whether SharePoint 2010 could meet Council’s document and records management […]

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. […]

This post is part of a new series where we report on some key digital recordkeeping enquiries received each month and the responses given. We hope that this information can assist others in managing their digital recordkeeping challenges. If you have feedback on the advice we have given or if you have additional suggestions, we would love to […]

Kate and I spoke at the NSW Records Managers’ Forum yesterday. We had a lot of interest in our blog post for International Archives Day, Our Our top 5 – Why recordkeeping is awesome!  So, for the Forum, we chose to expand on this theme, and develop a bit of a ‘manifesto’ for good recordkeeping and to […]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/katerw/4566825653/ 30 June 2012 marks the end of the phased implementation timetable of State Records’ Standard on digital recordkeeping. Under the terms of the Standard, records now need to be made and kept of the high risk business operations that are performed in all your relevant digital business systems. It is important to be aware that […]