Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

One of the issues we are talking to agencies a lot about at the moment is information longevity, primarily the fact that an awful lot of business information will need to outlive the system it is part of. This concept however, still does not have significant traction or understanding. In most business environments, systems or services […]

June 9 was International Archives Day. Happy International Archives Day everyone! Back in 2001, physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford wrote a book called Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates across Millennia. In it he asked questions like, in one million years time, what information will we need to leave to the future inhabitants of […]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/webatelier/5929855686/ Janet Knight and I were having a conversation the other day about what it is that recordkeeping systems are supposed to do. We were asking what are the functional requirements for recordkeeping that should be incorporated into business system design or development to support recordkeeping, or used to assess business systems from a recordkeeping perspective. […]

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/

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 […]

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?

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) […]