Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

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 between digitising paper records and building a digital archives to manage all types of digital records.

Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/martinbekkelund/2397647179/

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/

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In February State Records released an Exposure Draft of its Managing digitisation programs and projects guidance. Two new case studies have now been added to this guidance.

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photo credit: Rusty Clark

Organisations run on information. Without good digital business information, organisations will be hampered by radically increased business risks, liabilities and inefficiencies.

In even the most general scenarios, managing your digital business information so that it is accurate, accessible and accountable is a challenge. But seeking to manage it successfully through any of the following seven scenarios raises its own specific challenges. In no particular order, here’s a quick discussion on why, and some ideas for what you can do to combat these particular digital recordkeeping challenges in your own organisation. Read the rest of this entry »

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 a careful and detailed evaluation process to determine the appropriateness of the submitted proposals against identified requirements, the proposal submitted by Logicalis Australia Pty Ltd was selected for the project.

Logicalis is a well established international IT solutions and managed services provider with expertise in areas such as data centre implementation, cloud services solutions and managed services. A project team from Logicalis will partner with the Digital Archives project team as part of the design and development process with implementation of the Digital Archives ICT platform set for the start of April 2012.

The ICT platform for the State Records NSW Digital Archive will consist of integrated server, storage and virtualisation technologies. The Digital Archive system capable of ingesting, preserving and storing digital State archives in the Digital Archive repository will sit on top of this ICT platform. This system is also in design and development stages and is being custom built in-house.

A key component of the infrastructure is the storage platform Isilon. This was chosen by State Records for its scalability and flexibility as well as the inbuilt ‘smarts’ it offers for file checking and integrity. Isilon has been used extensively in the media and film sector as well as by government organisations such as libraries and registry offices.

Other elements of the Digital Archives including a metadata framework, advice for agencies on records migration and a modular set of tools and functions supporting the management and use of long term digital records are in the design and development stages.

The Digital Archives project is a three year project run by State Records NSW to implement a whole of government digital archive to accept, preserve and store digital State archives.

photo credit: TANAKA Juuyoh (田中十洋)

The compliance timetable supporting the Standard on digital recordkeeping says that, in order to manage your digital records effectively, you should focus your time and resources on identifying and improving the systems that support the high risk business processes in your organisation. In this post we will look at some of the issues associated with identifying and assessing the systems that support high risk business processes in your organisation. Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce the release of a new Exposure draft: Managing digitisation programs and projects

A digital image of an archival record

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photo credit: woodleywonderworks

A recent UK survey found that 45% of surveyed SharePoint users have copied sensitive or confidential documents from SharePoint to their local PC or a USB Key, or have emailed them to third parties. Of these, 98% had done so because they needed to work on a document at home or to send a document to someone without access to SharePoint.

While apparently well intentioned, these users’ actions threatened the confidentiality and integrity of the documents. These findings demonstrate how important it is to consider the ways in which people work and the ways in which they will want to access documents or share information with colleagues as part of a SharePoint implementation. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

photo credit: Glenn Waters ぐれんin Japan.

I have just finished reading (at lunch time today!) John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It was fantastic! My first le Carre experience and I loved it. My appreciation of the story was enhanced even further because a crucial aspect of the case against alleged double agent Mundt hinged on metadata!

In Chapter 12, East, the East German operative Fiedler is interrogating the British spy Leamas. In my edition of the book, they spend five fabulous pages discussing the distribution list metadata (the subscription label they call it) attached to the front of a file and what that metadata means in terms of who may have accessed the file and how this may have impacted on the conspiracy. It was fantastic! This simple set of metadata led to critical deductions that contributed to the final dramatic outcomes of the book. Go metadata! Read the rest of this entry »