preserving archival records in business...
TRANSCRIPT
PRESERVING ARCHIVAL RECORDS
IN BUSINESS SYSTEMS
Making & keeping digital records accessible
Neal Fitzgerald
Queensland State Archives, Brisbane,
Australia
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Hello I am Neal Fitzgerald from the Queensland State Archives in Brisbane, Australia. I have worked with database backed business systems in the corporate and government sectors since the early 1980s. I started work at Honeywell-Bull as the administrator of a network model database before Oracle and relational databases gained prominence, and have worked on ORACLE, SQL Server, open source products, FoxPro, Access, FileMaker Pro I have been working in the Archives and Libraries sector for the last 11 years. Today I want to give you some background on the Queensland State Archives engagement with records in business systems. I’ll explore some ideas that came out of the review of a tool kit we developed to help government agencies manage archival records in business systems that are being decommissioned and switched off. And then I will offer some of my own personal speculations about how Archives like ours might respond to opportunites presented by as-a-Service, cloud computing and data analytics.
Queensland State Archives • Public Records Act 2002
– Queensland State Archives provides for the management, safekeeping & preservation of public records across government
– Records are the evidence of the affairs, business transactions and decisions made by government agencies
• Information Privacy Act 2009
• Right to Information Act 2009
• Open Data
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Under the Public Records Act 2002, Queensland State Archives provides for the management, safekeeping and preservation of records across government. We define records as evidence of the affairs, business transactions and decisions made by government agencies. So we have a whole of government mandate to ensure records are captured and preserved for as long as they are required. The Queensland public have rights of access to government information under the Public Records Act, the Information Privacy Act and the Right to Information Act. And our government is considering legislation to make government records and datasets available as open data for use by private enterprise, other agencies and the public. So we also have a public access focus.
Advice on records in business systems • ICA ISO 16175 part 3
– Principles & Functional Requirements for Records in Business Systems
• Queensland Government Digital Continuity Strategy – ability to find, access, deliver and (re)use digital records for as long as
required through organisational, business & technological changes
• Guideline on Migrating Digital Records
• Decommissioning Business Systems Toolkit
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We have published a range of policies and guidelines for agencies on records held in business systems. In 2008 Queensland State Archives was a lead author of the International Council on Archives ISO 16175 - Principles and Functional Requirements for Records in Business Systems. This standard sets out a comprehensive list of recordkeeping functional requirements covering the capture of records and appropriate recordkeeping metadata, maintaining the integrity of the records and allowing for the disposal of the records when they are no longer needed. In 2012 we produced the Queensland Government Digital Continuity Strategy We see digital continuity as the ability to find, access, deliver and use digital records through organisational, business and technological change. For us, the purpose of digital capture and preservation activities is to provide access to records and to allow re-use. Also in 2012 we released a guideline on Migrating Digital Records. The Decommissioning Business Systems Toolkit was released in October 2013. This was produced in response to a government ICT audit in 2012 that found a large number of business systems created just before the year 2000 were all nearing end of their useful life. They were often hosted on old hardware and software infrastructures and would soon need to be decommissioned.
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The decommissioning toolkit is a methodology to help agencies decide if a business system contains archival records that need to be retained and if so what to do with them. This slide shows the decommissioning toolkit workflow diagram. You can Google Queensland State Archives decommissioning toolkit to find out more on our web site. Or if you are going to the iPres conference in Melbourne early next month, I will be delivering a paper on the toolkit.
Decommissioning agency review • Want help to add / assess ISO16175 record
keeping functions in new & existing systems • Successive migrations for preservation • Want help to preserve and keep accessible
other long term value records
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Let’s examine some of the findings of our review of how the agencies used the toolkit. Using the toolkit exposed deficiencies in the recordkeeping functionality of the business systems being decommissioned. In some cases records that should have been captured were not being captured in the first place or had been lost. Agencies are asking for simple tools to implement the ISO 16175 standard for recordkeeping functionality in new systems and also to retrofit existing systems. Government in Queensland is keen to move to an application as-a- Service model, particularly for commodity business systems. It may be that Archives could provide a market intelligence service on the recordkeeping functionality of common as-a-Service applications. Mostly the toolkit was used to decommission business systems where their records had been fully migrated to new business systems. Agencies plan to preserve records over time by successive migrations into new systems as the current technologies become obsolete. But there will also be a significant number of long term value records that will remain in agency custody. The risk of record loss increases as business need decreases. Agencies want help preserving and keeping these records accessible.
Using SIARD • Screen & reports as accessible
record presentation formats • Add corresponding SQL as
instantiated views • XSL to replicate screens and
reports as XHTML • Machine processable SIARD XML
bundle
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Agencies will still want to transfer permanent digital records to the archives. They also will need to keep records from systems that serviced government functions that have ceased. Low cost, open standard, text or XML based technology independent formats are required. We plan to trial SIARD tools to preserve records not being migrated to new business systems. Some screens and reports produced by the business system will we hope be more human accessible record presentation formats. We will add the SQL corresponding to screens and reports to the database layer as instantiated views before archiving with SIARD. We will create XSL style sheets to allow the generation of XHTML replicas of the screens and reports. The aim would be a machine processable SIARD archive that could be transformed by a range of software tools to provide open data sets and human readable formats.
Distributed archiving, discovery, access, preservation • Harvest metadata / access copies? • Do we become service brokers?
– Archiving-as-a-Service – Redaction-as-a-Service – Access control-as-a-Service – Discovery-as-a-Service – Preservation-as-a-Service
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Our government is moving to break down silos of information held in government agencies. We have a One Stop Shop Queensland government website with content arranged by function rather than by department. Perhaps we should add mechanisms to agency business systems to allow a central public record access portal to harvest metadata and understandable access versions of the records so the public can discover and use public records whether they are in a centralised archive or in agency custody. We are moving to ICT-as-a-Service. Government services are being competitively tested against services provided by private enterprise. So in this digital as-a-Service environment, maybe state archives can become researchers, advisors and brokers of services for record archiving, redaction, access control, discovery, open data sets, record repurposing and preservation-as-a-Service.
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So rather than the digital archives becoming like the ‘Library of Babel’ in Jorge Luis Borges’ story containing “all knowledge shelved together with all falsehood,” pure and impure information in a world of immobilizing abundance where in the mirrored shelves can be found everything and nothing,
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We see archivists as multi-skilled knowledge workers adding context and meaning at the coal face of the knowledge pyramid using tools of information management, the semantic web, data warehousing, data integration and big data analysis.
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Brokering partnerships with government agencies, other cultural and knowledge institutions, software and service providers and engaging with the public through crowd sourcing and other innovative initiatives.