Tender Awarded for Design and Development of the Digital Archives ICT Platform February 14, 2012

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.

 

 

2 Comments
Bora Wiemann February 22nd, 2012

Just a question: What approaches are used for the long term preservation and potential necessary conversion of the content formats?

Richard Lehane February 23rd, 2012

Thanks for the question Bora. Our intention is to approach the transfer of agency records to the digital archive as a migration from one recordkeeping system to another (the digital archive). We’ll undertake these ‘system migrations’ as projects and as part of each project will assess long term preservation risks with respect to the file formats involved. On the basis of that assessment, we’ll develop a preservation plan for the records. This may involve format conversion (other approaches such as emulation may also be taken as appropriate). While our approach is therefore ‘case by case’, we will document each project and create template plans for common record types and will seek to automate our processes as much as possible. State Records will collaborate with agencies in undertaking these projects & preservation actions may be undertaken by State Records itself or by the agency, whoever is best placed to do so. Where format conversion does take place, we intend to also preserve records in their original formats. We’re aware that new preservation risks will develop over time and will perform ongoing monitoring of records in the digital archive.

For more detail, please check out this discussion paper we posted to this blog last year:
/what-we-reckon-about-keeping-digital-archives-high-level-principles-guiding-state-records%E2%80%99-approach/

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