Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

A couple of weeks ago I went to Future Perfect: Digital preservation by design 2012 organised by Archives New Zealand and held at the national museum, Te Papa, in Wellington. Now in its second year, it’s fantastic to have a digital preservation themed event like this happening in our region – no such event exists, […]

The Digital Archives project was profiled in an article published yesterday on IT News: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/294188,nsw-govt-to-open-source-digital-archives-software.aspx. It’s a great piece, giving extensive coverage to digital preservation issues, the scope of the Digital Archives project, the benefits of an ‘open source’ approach,  metadata, search, and (one of our bugbears) making it clear that there is a difference […]

Logicalis, the company selected in January 2012 based on a Request for Proposal process to design, procure and implement the ICT infrastructure for State Records NSW’s Digital Archives project, has published a media release about the project. Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mayhem/2939259129/

On 17 November 2011 State Records NSW released a Request for Proposal (RFP) to procure supply of goods and specialist services for the design, procurement and implementation of an integrated ICT solution which will form the ICT platform for its Digital Archives project. The due date for submission of proposals was 12 January 2012. After […]

Executive Summary This research paper discusses three problems with using the term transfer to describe the processes that precede ingest into the digital archives and recommends instead the adoption of a project-based, system migration approach.

State Records’ digital archives project has been underway for 6 months now, so before we all collapse for the Christmas break, thought it might be a good time to let you know how we’re travelling. 1. We’re developing systems to support digital continuity partnerships We see the protection, preservation and accessibility of digital records of […]

Over the last couple of months in the new(ish) digital archives project we have been researching, talking to people and thinking quite a lot about the principles that should guide our approach to keeping NSW’s digital State archives. While State Records’ broader Policy on digital records preservation (2007) is still extremely sound and sets up […]

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 […]

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 […]

(With apologies to Star Trek) Our last post was the exciting announcement that State Records had finally secured the resources to start on a project to develop and implement a digital State archives. But it’s probably hard, at this very early stage, to really understand what that will mean in reality. So we thought it […]