Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

Posted on behalf of Catherine Robinson, Senior Project Officer, Government Recordkeeping. The Sydney Morning Herald has reported that Wollongong City Council is leading the way in providing smart technology to incoming Councillors to assist them in creating and capturing records of Council business. New Councillors elected in the September elections for Wollongong City Council will […]

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 […]

Image: Niles E. Hewlett Enterprise architects and records managers have much to gain by working together. Records managers can contribute their expert knowledge of their organisation’s ‘business’ and its ‘data’ assets. By working with enterprise architects, records managers can improve the visibility of their programs, receive assistance in strategic tasks such as the development of business cases, and, most […]

Storing electronic information in shared (network) drives can be convenient and easy for staff and can enable the sharing and backup of documents. However, if they are not managed well, shared drives can cause you a number of problems. For example, if you do not set up and maintain rigorous folder structures and titling controls, […]

We know from speaking with many different public offices that addressing the recordkeeping risks associated with business systems is a major challenge for the NSW government. That is why we have developed a half day workshop called ‘Managing  recordkeeping risk in business systems’.

The National Archives (TNA) of the United Kingdom have defined digital continuity as: “establishing an ability to access and use digital information for as long as organisations need to, over however long the timescales are required, and through organisational, business and technology changes.” TNA also makes the point with this definition that: “It (digital continuity) […]