Quoting from Edition Number 493f. Updated Friday 04 March 2016.
Digital record keeping in ‘red zone’
David Fricker
The threat to record keeping in the Australian Public Service due to the transition from paper-based systems to paperless offices has the service approaching a ‘red zone’ according to the Director-General of the National Archives of Australia, David Fricker.
Addressing a gathering of senior records managers in Canberra during the week, Mr Fricker said the backlog of material that had not been processed due to technological change and other issues was “pretty scary.”
“I don’t want to sugar-coat this,” the Director-General said in answer to a question, “there’s stuff in obsolete formats, there’s stuff lying around in all sorts of undescribed, unmanaged environments; there’s stuff that’s out there that we don’t know about.
“However, that said, we’re not in crisis.”
Archives facing preservation challenges
He said Archives was facing an “awful lot” of preservation issues.
“We have a lot of magnetic media for example – it’s not digital, it’s just analogue magnetic and that technology is rapidly becoming obsolete to read.”
He said the organisation was on e-Bay attempting to buy the equipment so it could be read before it was digitised.
“We’re managing it but we’re in the amber/red zone,” he said.
“We have to watch it very carefully.”
Mr Fricker said he was confident industry would come up with the equipment needed for outdated record formats to be read into the future.
“The APS spends about $6 billion a year on IT and I think we spend about $5 billion on top of that collecting data,” he said.
“That $6 billion of purchasing power can buy you a lot of influence in the industry.”
Mr Fricker said Archives was leading the whole of Government Digital Continuity 2020program that aimed to support efficiency, innovation, interoperability, information re-use and accountability in recordkeeping
His address was entitled “What hope is there of transparency and integrity of Government in the digital age?”
He concluded there was hope.
“We’re on to it” he said.
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