NSW embarks on pan-government Digital Archiving

defencereserves.com

The State Records Authority of New South Wales (NSW) is embarking on a project that will implement a digital archiving facility that would improve digital record keeping across the Government.

Community Access Points — State Records NSW (records.nsw.gov.au)

Cassie Findlay, Senior Project Officer in the NSW State Records Authority told FutureGov Asia Pacific that the State Records’ aim is to create a whole-of-Government digital archive to accept, preserve, and store digital Government records as archives.

“Up to until now we’ve only been able to accept and preserve records in hard copy format so we’ve been very much a paper based archives and of course this is something that is not really meeting the requirements of the Government anymore given that many Government organisations in Australia now do their business entirely in the electronic environment, the latter which we identified as something that we needed to address as soon as possible.”

The planned A$3.4 million (US$3.4 million) Digital Archive would be capable of receiving digital records in all formats from the NSW Government public offices, and convert the records into stable, long term preservation formats.

Records preserved will be available for retrieval by public offices and be accessible online to the public as constituted under the State Records Act’s access regime.

The digital archiving system will comply with the international standard for open archival information system which will make use of digital preservation tools, including the National Archives of Australia’s “Xena” tool for the normalisation of digital record formats.

“National Archives’ tool is one example that we are looking to adopt and to integrate into the digital archives solution” Findlay said.

“There’s a whole range of digital preservation tools that have been developed by groups all over the world that shows a lot of promise for our needs.”

“We will be initially looking at which ones best suits our requirements by looking at our business processes and what we want to preserve, things like what kind of records metadata we’re preserving, how that will integrate with our archives control systems, and a whole range of factors that will really build a suite of tools and technologies that will allow us to achieve those aims,” she said.

The digital records solution will hold both individual public office’s corporate memory and the archival resources of the Government and people of NSW, which would pertain to any information collected and received by a public office during the course of its official duty.

According to Findlay, many digital record formats used by the Government are proprietary in nature and can only be opened by the software application which they were created. As a result, if the original creating application is no longer available then the digital record cannot be accessed in the long-term.

Findlay added that Archives must be kept useable for hundreds of years and should span multiple generations of technological change.

“We have benefitted from the fact that the technology we’re using for the Digital Archives solution is Open source.”

“One of the driving principles in a lot of digital preservation is to stick with open source tools rather than locking yourself into commercial arrangements where you have restrictions with what you can and cannot do with your information, which is not acceptable for a Government archives,” she said.

The Digital State Archives Solution is a three year project, which has just started early this year. According to Findlay limited transfers of digital archive will be made available during the project’s development process.

Findlay further added that, once the project is completed, it will be a case of being open to transfers of digital records to any type.

“Our aim is for the project to be open for a full range of possible digital records to be thrown at us after three years.”

-futuregov.com | By Clarice Africa