Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

In financially unstable times we often need to justify why our organisations need to put money into records management. It does not produce immediate and visible results: there are no new clients, no income stream directly attributable to good recordkeeping.  And it costs money to implement. However, a sound records management program is like an insurance […]

photo credit: verlaciudad Last week State Records ran a half day workshop, Managing recordkeeping risk in business systems. We had a fantastic group of participants who really engaged with the topic and brought a whole range of valuable experience to the discussion. The workshop was developed to support implementation of State Records’s Standard on digital […]

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: 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 […]

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 […]

Google is closing its Google Videos site and binning your old movies. The search giant, which also owns YouTube, won’t keep the videos that have been uploaded to the site. – Rich Trenholm ‘Google Videos to nix your flix’ CNET News. Accessed April 18, 2011 8:32 AM PDT http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20054913-1.html#ixzz1JvrKCkks Perhaps we should actually stop to […]

Removable media, including optical disks (DVDs, CDs), memory cards and USB flash drives, are commonly used for offline storage or for moving data so it can be accessed away from the office. While there are obvious benefits in using removable media, there are also a range of risks.

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) […]