Good recordkeeping is an insurance policy October 12, 2011 No Comments
However, a sound records management program is like an insurance policy. Without it, you are putting yourself at great risk. Read the rest of this entry »
Information management – is it the new ‘thing’? October 11, 2011 2 Comments
“Information is a strategic asset and must be managed like other assets, such as people or capital.” So says the Global research firm Gartner. What we records and information managers have been saying for years! Read the rest of this entry »
What we reckon about keeping digital archives: High level principles guiding our approach September 30, 2011 No Comments
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 a good policy basis that applies both to us and to NSW public offices, it’s time with this project to address more specifically the philosophy underpinning the design of our processes and systems for keeping permanent value digital records as State archives. So that’s what we have tried to do in these ‘high level principles’, below.
We would love your comments on them. You can either use the commenting facility on the blog or email me; cassandra.findlay@records.nsw.gov.au
Standardised, but flexible
We will support industry standards and protocols wherever possible instead of creating our own.
We will keep the Robert De Niro principle in mind when adopting any software or hardware solutions: “You want to be makin moves on the street, have no attachments, allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner” (Heat, 1995)
Image credit: Warner Bros, Heat movie poster
In other words, our digital archives technology will be designed to be sustainable given our limited resources so it will be flexible and scalable to allow us to utilise the most appropriate tools at a given time to carry out actions such as creation of preservation or access copies or monitoring of repository contents, but replace these tools with new ones easily and with minimal cost and with minimal impact.
It’s all about recordkeeping
We consider archival transfer to be a migration of records from one recordkeeping system to another recordkeeping system.
Therefore we will treat each migration as a separate instance – to be considered as a ‘project’ – and we will use the best tools and techniques for the recordkeeping system concerned, based on a thorough analysis of the recordkeeping system, its structure, format dependencies, metadata and export functionalities. Read the rest of this entry »
Arrgghhh! RIMPA Convention organisers don’t need to walk the plank! September 28, 2011 No Comments
In mid September I attended the Records and Information Professionals Australasia (RIMPA) 2011 inForum Convention in Darwin. The theme was Communicate: Collaborate: Innovate.
The Pirate ship at the 'Treasure and Treachery' dinner
Recordkeeping, web 2.0 and social media September 16, 2011 1 Comment
photo credit: Cappellmeister
Last month I ran a workshop at the Local Government Web Network (http://lgwebnetwork.org/) conference on recordkeeping and web 2.0. This is always a really great conference: beautifully organised, diverse and interesting presentations and an excellent group of engaged participants. At the workshop there was a whole host of interesting discussion, so here is a bit of an attempt to summarise what we all talked about.
Records, risks, business systems and government information September 2, 2011 No Comments
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 recordkeeping. It’s intended to help organisations manage the risks associated with the move to the digital business environment.
The move to digital business operations makes strategic, operational and business sense and therefore must be supported. But real business risks arise when the need for recordkeeping is not considered as part of the business system design and implementation process. Unfortunately, it often happens that recordkeeping is not adequately considered and is also not native functionality in these systems, and real risks do arise as a result. Read the rest of this entry »
Facilitating good recordkeeping in local government August 23, 2011 No Comments
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 be issued with smartphones and iPads to better facilitate their recordkeeping. Read the rest of this entry »
Digitisation does not equal digital preservation! August 10, 2011 3 Comments
Digitisation of the Codex Sinaiticus. See http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/ for details.
I went to a digital preservation conference recently where the focus, to my surprise, was mainly on digitisation projects and programs. Many seem to believe that by turning paper records into digital images they are preserving them. But is this the case? Read the rest of this entry »
Here comes everybody: What does information ubiquity mean for the archives? August 4, 2011 3 Comments
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 of four or five’ [15]. So say Daniel J Caron and Richard Brown from Library and Archives Canada in their disturbingly fascinating article in the current edition of the Canadian archival journal Archivaria (Number 71, Spring 2011), ‘The Documentary Moment in the Digital Age: Establishing New Value Propositions for Public Memory’. Read the rest of this entry »
DAM it! July 12, 2011 No Comments
Barbie and ken reunite in the Web 2.0 world (image from hardblogcafe.com).
Digital modes of business and have changed recordkeeping practices dramatically. The ‘ground rules’ have shifted and now it’s harder for staff to even identify what a digital record is, let alone understand when and how they need to capture it!
As so much recordkeeping needs to happen at an individual level it is our collective responsibility as recordkeeping professionals to arm staff in our organisations with the skills to meet their new responsibilities.
At State Records NSW we have a professional development program to raise staff awareness, knowledge and skills about digital recordkeeping issues. As part of this program we host an annual Digital Awareness Month, known affectionately as ‘DAM’. Read the rest of this entry »
