Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

The Standard on Records Management was issued to the NSW public sector today. It has been over a year of planning, development and consultation, and we had some great feedback from the professional community. The standard is now available on the State Records NSW website together with implementation resources. A comprehensive implementation guide is available […]

Last week the State Records NSW Digital Archives team was in Melbourne for the iPres 2014 Conference.  We presented a poster on Thursday outlining our Migration Methodology during the Posters and Demonstrations session.  Many conference attendees stopped by to talk about the State Records NSW approach to preserving a digital record of government activity, even […]

I’ve previously blogged about the review of standards at State Records NSW which is happening this year. We have reviewed five of the records management standards currently in place for the NSW public sector and now propose to approve a new standard under the State Records Act 1998.  We are seeking your comments on the […]

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. […]

One of the issues we are talking to agencies a lot about at the moment is information longevity, primarily the fact that an awful lot of business information will need to outlive the system it is part of. This concept however, still does not have significant traction or understanding. In most business environments, systems or services […]

June 9 was International Archives Day. Happy International Archives Day everyone! Back in 2001, physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford wrote a book called Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates across Millennia. In it he asked questions like, in one million years time, what information will we need to leave to the future inhabitants of […]

Email has become a ubiquitous business tool in the last 20 years. It has become the default tool for purposes too numerous to list: announcements, distributing documents, sales and customer service interactions, among other uses. Email’s versatility means it is used in all areas of an organisation’s business, which means that it may hold information […]

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 […]

The Digital Archives migration methodology has been released as an exposure draft and is available on the State Records website. The Digital Archives project team has been developing the migration methodology to establish a means of managing transfers of digital records required as State archives to the Digital Archives.

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 […]