Backups serve a very important purpose: they provide protection against many forms of data loss by creating multiple, regular, distributed copies. While they ensure short-term integrity, they are not intended to store data over a long period of time. Rather, they are designed to restore a system to a fixed time and date, and are dependent on maintaining the infrastructure of the system they back up.
This guide provides a checklist against which an existing or new business system may be assessed to determine:
- whether the business the system supports is subject to any recordkeeping requirements
- how well the business system is currently functioning or will function as a recordkeeping system
- what action may be required to enable the business system to meet recordkeeping requirements.
Knowing your business and your business information needs, planning any integrations with current business systems well, planning for the stability and longevity of your core business information, being aware of the information-related impacts of system change, planning and managing change, deploying metadata requirements strategically, and assessing your need for system documentation requirements will help determine information management requirements when developing new corporate systems.
Archival appraisal is perhaps the most important — and certainly the most final — decision-making function that an archives institution undertakes. A decision not to keep records as archives is forever: once the records are gone, they cannot be brought back. A decision to keep records as archives is also forever: it involves an explicit commitment to apply the resources needed to preserve them — and to keep applying resources — for as long as the archives survive.
The purpose of this document is to establish a policy framework for the conduct of records appraisal in the NSW public sector and to state fundamental objectives to guide the identification of State archives.
The report provides a benchmark against which NSW State Archives and Records can measure the success of its programs. The report offers an in-depth analysis of the current understanding of recordkeeping obligations.
The purpose of this section of the guidelines is to:
- examine common reasons why back-capture digitisation projects are undertaken (i.e. what benefits they can bring)
- explore some considerations relevant to these reasons.
The purpose of this section of the guidelines is to discuss how to make good selection decisions for records to target in back-capture digitisation projects.
The purpose of this section of the guidelines is to examine some of the benefits, costs and risks associated with a business process digitisation program and how to mitigate those risks.