IKA Øst IKS - a company for long-term storage of electronic archives By Børge Strand

About IKA Øst A company owned by five municipalities, i.e. local government bodies Functioning since mid April 2012 Manager: Børge Strand Business idea: To serve as a repository for the owners electronic archives

Electronic archives – what do we mean? We mean archives that are created electronically, e.g. in databases, electronic registers etc. – without any paperbased origin The concepts electronic archives and digital archives are used synonymously Not to be confused with computerised archives, which have a paper based origin, but have been computerised during the latest decades. Electronic archives must remain in electronic shape also in the archives

Electronic archives - groups and subgroups 1. Systems for internal administration – 1A. Electronic record keeping systems/case handling systems – 1B. Other systems for internal administration 2. Subject-specific systems (databases/registers) – 2A. Systems for subject-specific administrative purposes (administrative registers) – 2B. Systems for non-administrative purposes (statistical and/or research registers) 3. Other systems (multimedia, audio files etc.)

Electronic archives - examples The 1960 Population and Housing census in Norway was planned and designed as a digital census The Norwegian Central Population Register (CPR) was born digitally in 1964 During the 1960s several electronic administrative systems were introduced in public administration Important characteristics are a widespread data exchange and data reuse – data about persons, real estate, organisations etc. are found in numerous systems This is possible due to a set of national identifiers

Computerised archives Archives which have a paper based origin, but have been computerised during the latest decades The 1801 Population Census was created on paper questionnaires during February 1801 – and computerised in the early 1970s The paper based version is the original - which also serves as a backup – electronic storage is not critical for this kind of archives No national identifiers exist for computerised archives

Long-term storage of electronic archives Long-term storage – i.e. in principle = storage for ever! Different strategies for this purpose exist, among these is one strategy known as the migration strategy where the basic principle is systems independent storage. The main idea is to separate information from its native system: We do not save the hardware or the software environment – only information from a given system. Information has to be exported from the native system and stored as raw data A fundamantal requirement is of course also to keep technical metadata

Long-term storage - continued In active, administrative use any electronic system will have a user interface which makes the information accessible and understandable. But a system with its given user interface, functionality and hardware environment cannot be preserved over time. The price to pay for long term storage of digitally created information is that the accessibility provided by a living system, is lost.

Technical metadata The National Archivist of Norway has developed a standard for this: ADDML - Archival Data Description Markup Language Together the exported tables in raw data shape and the technical metadata constitute a package of information which makes data accessible and understandable Example