The regular monitoring of records, recordkeeping and records and information management is beneficial for all public sector organisations. This page includes information on roles and responsibilities, the Regulatory Framework and monitoring tools.
The Regulatory Framework describes our approach to regulating records management, and how we intend to use the powers in the State Records Act 1998 to support our regulatory activities.
Regular monitoring of records management, and an organisation-wide program for information governance (encompassing records, information and data), is beneficial for all public offices.
When you send or receive a text or short message service (SMS) message for work purposes, it is a State record. This means it must be captured, maintained and disposed of in accordance with the State Records Act 1998.
Email messages sent and received in the course of official business are State records under the State Records Act 1998. This includes messages sent and received by Ministers in the course of their official duties. It also includes messages relating to any aspect of official (government) business coming from private email accounts.
Large amounts of corporate information and corporate risk are tied up in email systems. Email therefore needs special treatment by organisations and specific requirements and systems need to be in place to ensure that email can be managed.
This guidance provides advice for NSW public offices on planning and performing migration processes so that they can meet the conditions for the destruction of source records, when appropriate.
Removable media is storage media which is designed to be removed from a computer. Removable media is low cost, portable and simple, allowing people to copy, store and carry large quantities of data easily between locations. Employees can share information easily and access it from a variety of locations, which can increase the organisation’s productivity. However there are a number of risks associated with the use of removable media.
Advances in technology have ensured that it is now easy to create, replicate and share digital images. However, these images generally take up a lot of storage space are more susceptible to abuse or human error. Therefore it is important to carefully address issues regarding the capture, management and disposal of digital images, particularly if they are to be used for evidentiary purposes.
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.
The Model Code of Meeting Practice for Local Councils 2018 requires that from 14 December 2019:
This guidance provides strategies for public offices to consider when configuring Microsoft 365. To achieve compliance with the Standard on Records Management and the State Records Act 1998, public offices will need to assess Microsoft 365 with the business systems checklist.
The strategies provided are not exhaustive and current at the time of publication of this advice.
We recommend NSW public offices to use this guidance in assessing or understanding the records and information management capabilities of existing or future Microsoft 365 environment.
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.
Due to social distancing requirements NSW public offices have embraced and deployed virtual meetings in lieu of face-to-face meetings. Virtual conference platforms enable recording of meetings. These recordings are State records.
This advice provides information on establishing business rules on how to manage recordings and related disposal classes.
This page contains guidance that will assist Ministers' offices to create and keep records appropriately and comply with their obligations under the Act. Offices of New South Wales Government Ministers are 'public offices' as defined in section 3 (1) of the State Records Act 1998.
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 of the guidelines is to describe how to manage original paper records in digitisation projects.
The purpose of this section of the guidelines is to discuss how to manage digital images as records.
This authority provides for the authorised disposal of State records which have been used as the input or source records for successful migration operations. It replaces the General retention and disposal authority: source records that have been migrated (GA33).
Records held by NSW Government organisations are a valuable resource for NSW Government and the community. Records are a core strategic asset and need to be protected and managed appropriately through any form of administrative change.