Future Proof – Protecting our digital future

Email has become a ubiquitous business tool in the last 20 years. It has become the default tool for purposes too numerous to list: announcements, distributing documents, sales and customer service interactions, among other uses. Email’s versatility means it is used in all areas of an organisation’s business, which means that it may hold information […]

In our next post to celebrate Information Awareness Month, we are again looking at social media. As information professionals, we need to respond to the fact that a lot of key business operations are moving to social media technologies.  photo by: Book Worm Laser & Design

For Information Awareness Month here at State Records, we are doing a series of posts on key challenges facing information professionals today. And, Master Chef style, these challenges don’t get much bigger than digital information retention and disposal. The ad hoc and unregulated deletion of information and the unwarranted over-retention of information can both critically affect […]

At our most recent EDRMS Implementer’s Group meeting, we discussed digital disposal. Specifically we discussed: are organisations using disposal authorities to sentence, retain or destroy digital information? are there drivers for or barriers to digital disposal? what are some main issues that might be impeding the implementation of digital disposal? Lots and lots of interesting […]

This post is part of a new series where we report on some key digital recordkeeping enquiries received each month and the responses given. We hope that this information can assist others in managing their digital recordkeeping challenges. If you have feedback on the advice we have given or if you have additional suggestions, we would love to […]

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 […]

photo credit: justindoub In October 2011, State Records distributed a survey on public sector attitudes and practices in relation to digital disposal to all NSW public offices. During the two week period it was available, 83 individual survey responses were received. The key issues that emerge from this survey are: limited record destruction is taking […]

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 […]

Software vendor Symantec recently reported on the results of its 2010 Information Management Health Check Survey. A key finding of the survey is that backup systems are being misused as indefinite storage for digital records. Symantec estimates that seventy-five percent of backup storage comprises material that is being retained ‘infinitely’ or is subject to a legal hold. This misuse of backup systems drives up costs […]

Requirements for destroying digital records The destruction of digital records is different to the destruction of hardcopy records. In particular, simply pressing ‘delete’ does not necessarily mean that the records are completely gone; while the link used to access them may be removed, they may still exist in a data store or on a server in […]