Managing Digital Records in the Long-Term – the NAA

ExperienceJames Doig

Digital Preservation

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Overview

• The Role of the National Archives

• Digital Preservation

• Case Studies

• Directions

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Role of the National Archives

• The Archives Act (1983)

– Disposal– Transfer– Preservation– Access

DISPOSAL / RECORDKEEPING

• Recordkeeping

• Records Disposal Authorities

• Standards

Record Authorities

• Legal Instrument

– Short-term Temporary– Long-term Temporary– Retain as National Archives (RNA)– Destructions: metadata is RNA

Transfer• Emergency Transfers

- Royal Commissions- Closing Agencies

• Personal Records- Share folders / Email- Election 2007

• Agency Transfers- Sentencing

Transfer Requirements• Commonwealth Record Series (CRS) system:

- archival descriptive standard for capturing provenance and original order

- by serialising records we preserve the recordkeeping structure in which records were kept

- Agency Registration, Series Form, Item List: these are loaded to RecordSearch

- Manifest provides file-level metadata: used in the digital preservation process

Preservation & Access

• Preserve significant Commonwealth records for current and future generations

• Make available to the public Commonwealth records more than 30 years old, with certain exemptions

Digital Preservation Objectives

• Preserve any type of digital record

• Created using any type of application

• On any computing platform

• Delivered on any digital media

• From any agency and any donor

• Provide discovery and access

• For current and future generations

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Digital Archive

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The NAA “Normalisation” Approach

• Translate into open, fully specified formats- essential characteristics- audit trail of the preservation

process

• Keep the original

• Store both with metadata

Some Preservation Formats

• ODF - Open Document Format

• XML – Extensible Markup Language

• PNG – Portable Network Graphics

• FLAC – Free Lossless Audio Codec

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Case Study 1

• Australian Institute of Criminology

• A13197: Speeches Made by Dr Adam Graycar, Director of the Australian Institute of Criminology

• CD-R received in November 2005: 400 files comprising doc, ppt, pdf

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File Structure

Transfer Forms: Item List

RecordSearch

Manifest

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Original file

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Preserved file

Xena Viewer

Case Study 2

• Inquiry into certain Australian companies in relation to the UN Oil-for-Food Programme

• Multiple series

• CDs received in December 2006

• Over 400,000 files, 23 gig – mostly TIFF, some pdf, xls and other formats

Case Study 2

• The images comprise over 100,000 scanned paper documents

• PM&C gets all the paper records and the actual recordkeeping software for access purposes

• The Archives asks for:

Export of files

Letters patent

Recordkeeping metadata

Transfer Forms: Item List

RecordSearch

Manifest

Preserved Letters Patent

Xena uses

• Open source – freely available from sourceforge • University of Sydney – D-Space Repository

• City of Perth – integrated into TRIM- customised Xena metadata wrapper

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Conclusion• Transfer process

- specify requirements for different systems- recordkeeping metadata

• Formats- design, tech drawing (CAD)- geospatial data- video- databases