Digitisation is the means of converting hard-copy or non-digital records into digital format. These guidelines provide advice for NSW public offices on implementing sound and well structured digitisation projects and programs for records.

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.

 This guidance discusses:  

  • admissibility of born digital records and digital images of records as evidence
  • proving the credibility of digital images
  • the types of documents that are still created or received in physical formats.

The destruction of State records should always be authorised. This means the destruction of the records is either permitted under a current retention and disposal authority issued by State Records NSW or under the 'normal administrative practice' provisions of the State Records Act 1998.

These guidelines have been prepared for personnel in New South Wales public offices who are responsible for arranging the destruction of State records as part of a program of authorised records disposal in accordance with Part 3 of the State Records Act 1998.

This document form metadata scheme establishes record types common to most organisations in the NSW public sector. This is a modified version of the same scheme in the Australian Government recordkeeping metadata standard (D21). In addition, some specific document forms for NSW government, councils, public health services and universities have been defined.

Disasters do occur and they often affect records and recordkeeping systems. This page is designed to provide quick and easy access to information you might need if you are dealing with a disaster or liaising with an insurance assessor.

The purpose of this section of the guidelines is to discuss ways of obtaining staff acceptance of digitisation and digital images produced in business process and back-capture digitisation programs.

The purpose of this section is to outline considerations that should be taken into account when deciding whether to conduct your back-capture digitisation project in-house or outsource it to a service provider.

These procedures assist organisations in developing retention and disposal authorities. Retention and disposal authorities are essential records management tools for an organisation and are an integral part of organisational efficiency and accountability.

These procedures cover:

  • requirements for preparing or revising a retention and disposal authority
  • identifying retention requirements for records
  • the process of submitting a retention and disposal authority for approval by State Records, and
  • using a retention and disposal authority issued to a predecessor or another organisation.

Organisations whose functional records are covered by general retention and disposal authorities (e.g. local government, public health services and organisation, local land services and universities) will not generally need to refer to these procedures as comprehensive retention and disposal coverage is already in place for your organisation's records.

These FAQs address some of the major questions about digitisation received by State Records’ staff.