Managing Digital Records in the Long-Term – the NAA Experience James Doig Digital Preservation

2 Overview The Role of the National Archives Digital Preservation Case Studies Directions

3 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 / - 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

9 Digital Archive

10 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

12 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

13 File Structure

Transfer Forms: Item List

RecordSearch

Manifest

17 Original file

18 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

32 Conclusion Transfer process - specify requirements for different systems - recordkeeping metadata Formats - design, tech drawing (CAD) - geospatial data - video - databases