EDRMS & business information systems and digital longevity

Cassie Findlay

State Records NSW

A digital record is…

• “.. digital information, captured at a specific point in time, that is kept as evidence of business activity.”

A digital recordkeeping system is…

• “..a system that captures, maintains and provides access to digital records over time.”

- State Records NSW, Standard on digital recordkeeping, 2008

What is digital longevity?

(Digital)• Records must be made • Records must be accurate • Records must be authentic • Records must have integrity • Records must be useable

- State Records NSW, Standard on full and accurate records, 2004

..for as long as they are required!

There is a fundamental difference between business systems and recordkeeping systems:

Business systems:• Dynamic content• Minimise redundancy• Context not preserved• Might be in the cloud

Recordkeeping systems:

• Static content• Redundancy• All about context• Usually the preferred

storage is in-house

The challenges

• Defining the record• Keeping records in accordance with minimum

standards• Determining the role of your IAMS (EDRMS)• Need for IT expertise• Replacing paper based recordkeeping that has

supported electronic systems in the past• Thinking differently about recordkeeping

Don’t panic!

A tale of two systems

• NSW Fire Brigades EDRMS implementation

• Whole of government e-recruitment system

Achieving digital longevity with the NSW Fire Brigades EDRMS implementation

• Replacing Recfind with Oracle ERDM• Implemented carefully structured metadata in a new

corporate-wide information management system• Carried out an assessment of their current metadata

practices, their business needs, the metadata capacities of their new system and the metadata requirements in the New South Wales Standard on digital recordkeeping

• Improved the picklists or encoding schemes used to populate some of the metadata fields

Achieving digital longevity with the NSW ‘e-recruitment’ system

• Working with the agency responsible for rolling the system out, we: Defined ‘typical’ recordkeeping requirements Assessed the system’s recordkeeping capability & the possible

role of local (in-agency) recordkeeping systems Considered issues associated with the use of a proprietary system

- eg format and export and with a cloud based system

• Result was a combination of retaining records in the solution and export to a local recordkeeping system – decisions based on system functionality, recordkeeping requirements and risk management

Common threads

• Clear requirements definition• Risks and opportunities• Metadata! Metadata! Metadata!• Thinking long term – put yourself in that future

manager’s shoes

Thank you

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