managing electronic records in governmental bodies - National ...

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records.
Archiving
Electronic records can be archived in two ways:
- When records are archived with an electronic document management system
the documents are moved from central magnetic disk storage to offline or less
expensive storage media. The electronic document management system
supports the ability to search document profiles as if they were online, and the
documents can be retrieved from offline storage to online use.
- With an electronic records management system the records are physically
removed from the repository entirely and they are transferred to an archives
repository or to off-site storage and the governmental body gives up
custodianship of the records.
The records management software chosen must include both possibilities and
should preserve the format, profiles, and supporting contextual information (the
metadata) of each document when it is archived.
Long term format
The electronic records management system must provide the functionality to store
records in non-proprietary formats, or to convert records to such formats upon
checking them into the electronic repository. Because non-proprietary formats are
better suited for migration than proprietary ones. The adoption of internationally
recognised data interchange and document format standards will simplify the
migration process. Data interchange is the ability to store files on the media using
one type of computer and then to access the content of the storage media by using
any other type of computer, while non-proprietary format implies that records created
in a specific format should be able to be read by other software packages in the
same way as the creators and users originally saw them. There are no guarantees
that any of the formats that exist at present would be able to be read in a few years’
time. However, the international community seems to be settling for PDF and XML
as the long term formats. It might therefore be necessary to convert the data written
in proprietary formats to standard hardware and software independent formats (e.g.
PDF, TIFF, XML) to enable migration strategies to be put in place.
An option at this stage is to ensure that records are self-sufficient by adding
encoding metadata to the record. This is done by adding simple textual encoding
that describes the data to indicate its extent, syntactic meaning, semantic meaning,
and relationship to other data in the record, and a reference to the specification of
the standard format that was used. This will enable future users to extract
information from the records even if they do not have the specific format the records
were created in, because they will be able to obtain the specifications of the formats
that were used.
Managing electronic records_Policy Guidelines.doc
First Edition
Version 1.1
April 2003