Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

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.

We are keeping too much information. The growing costs of information storage and management are mounting to the extent that very soon they will become unsustainable.  Unless proactive action is taken, the data bubble is going to burst and key information will be lost when it does. To date, however, the belief that storage is […]

Last year we blogged about our Digital Awareness Month initiative. Digital Awareness Month (aka DAM) is an internal professional development program aimed at raising State Records employees’ awareness, knowledge and skills in the area of digital recordkeeping. Each year during DAM we promote various issues and exciting new developments in this area through a series […]

In May 2012 we posted a summary of what key digital recordkeeping enquiries we had received from NSW agencies in the month and what responses we gave. We thought that perhaps it might be helpful to others pondering the same issues. A number of people viewed this post, so we have decided to do a similar […]

Government Recordkeeping staff at State Records spend a lot of time answering enquiries from NSW public sector organisations on a range of digital recordkeeping issues. We thought it might be valuable to highlight, in monthly blog posts, a few of the key enquiries and how we answered them. Perhaps you may have the same questions […]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/salihan/3590753580/ When talking to people across government about the importance of records management, recordkeeping controls and records disposal, we are very regularly challenged by the argument, ‘But storage is cheap. I can just keep it all. I can run Google across the top of all my data. I don’t need to do all these costly […]

photo credit: justindoub In October 2011, State Records distributed a survey on public sector attitudes and practices in relation to digital disposal to all NSW public offices. During the two week period it was available, 83 individual survey responses were received. The key issues that emerge from this survey are: limited record destruction is taking […]

One of the things recordkeeping professionals really struggle with in the digital environment is the management of disposal. In the paper world we would be called in when that storage room got too full or when a move was underway to clean up the pile of records and sort out their disposal or transfer. In […]

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 […]

State Records is working to unlock the information contained within retention and disposal authorities by adopting XML as the preferred format for drafting and publication. Authority Editor is an open source application for drafting and transforming authorities in XML. This application is now freely available for download online.