Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

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 and our answers can be helpful to you! Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smemon/5547535499/

Last month State Records distributed an informal online survey to our NSW public sector records contacts, to ask about social media use in NSW government. In this post we report on all the results. Read the rest of this entry »

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 and challenging things you are asking me to do.’ We make counter arguments about the costs of the long term management of these vast data stores, about the fact that this strategy possibly creates more risks than it mitigates, about the expense of the required migration and preservation actions, and about the fact that this isn’t really a management strategy at all, but really a strategy of management avoidance. But not a lot of people listen! That, however, could start to change because we are starting to get some hard data about the cost of this approach.

In this post we want to promote three fantastic blog posts that really challenge the notion that storage is cheap and that provide some quite staggering statistics to help to quantify exactly how wrong the ‘storage is cheap’ argument is. Read the rest of this entry »

We are currently reviewing our Future Proof blog to improve its structure and navigation and have discovered that, since its inception in 2008, the most commonly searched for terms is ‘EDRMS.’

We have been advising agencies for a number of years about EDRMS and implementation projects. We have published some information about EDRMS on the website and blog (though we admit it can be tricky to find!) We have also kept track of some wonderful guidance provided on other sites by practitioners and other archival authorities.

A project team – http://www.flickr.com/photos/belvoirphotos/4926429726/

To assist you, we have brought this all together in a new resource, FAQs about EDRMS . This resource is now available on our website. Our plan is to take note of further enquiries and comments from clients to refine and add to this list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) over time.

In this post we offer our top 10 tips for a great EDRMS implementation drawn from the new resource.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today we closed a chapter in the history of State Records NSW. Government Recordkeeping, including the Digital Recordkeeping Team, moved premises. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you work in NSW government?

Does your organisation tweet? Have a Facebook page? Use Yammer? Collaborate over a wiki? Or post videos to You Tube? If so we would love to hear from you!

If your NSW public office uses social media to raise its profile, communicate directly with the public and/or collaborate on a range of business issues, then we would love you to fill out our brief survey on social media and recordkeeping.

It should only take a couple of minutes to complete and we hope it will give us some good information on:

• what kinds of social media applications are being used in government
• why they are being used, and
• what recordkeeping strategies are necessary or feasible.

We also want to know if your NSW government organisation does not use social media – all information on how social media is being used or not used across government is of interest to us.

We will do a follow-up blog post soon to report on the survey results.

We have compiled the survey because we want to develop an online training course on social media recordkeeping, and the data from the survey will hopefully help us to make this relevant to the needs of the NSW public sector. Your feedback will also help us to recommend some specific recordkeeping strategies that will work with both the social media tools that are being used in NSW government and the business needs that are driving these different forms of social media use.

So if you work for the NSW public sector, we would really love to hear your views!

The survey closes on Friday 11 May.

[Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/henryfaber/230444653/]

Kate and I visited the Process and Records Services team at NSW Police headquarters recently. We were very impressed with a number of initiatives the team are undertaking and how they are reaching out to IT and the business. The main goals driving their projects include the desire to streamline business processes, reduce inefficiencies and ensure that the NSW Police Force are not creating ongoing records storage and legacy problems.

One of these initiatives is the subject of a new case study which has now been added to our draft Managing digitisation programs and projects guidance.  Read the rest of this entry »

Digitisation lab - http://www.flickr.com/photos/binglib/2736094250/

The exposure period is coming to an end on 27 April so please send us your comments!

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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, to my knowledge, in Australia. The conference attracted people working in digital preservation from libraries, archives, museums and government organisations from around the world, including speakers and attendees from the UK, USA, Denmark, Germany and the Czech Republic.

I thought I would share some of the interesting bits of the two days for me (bearing in mind there were split streams that were very difficult to make choices on). Read the rest of this entry »

Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/malisia/5091325424/

In March and April Janet Knight and I have run two sessions of State Records’ free half-day workshop, Managing recordkeeping risk in business systems. At both sessions we have had a full house of really engaged and interested participants. Thanks to their enthusiasm and willingness to share expertise and experience, Janet and I have learned as much as hopefully the participants did! Read the rest of this entry »