The record for Auld Lang Syne

By Paul Montgomery

What will records managers be doing at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999? Will they be enjoying the fireworks at a party? Or will they be biting their nails, sitting next to an air-conditioned roomful of computers, waiting for the arrival of the millennium bug?

Planning for the night when the clock ticks over to 2000 could be another in a long line of Y2K dilemmas for records managers. In the worst case scenario, if systems did crash during the night, then IT staff would no doubt be frantic in their efforts to restore their software via whatever means necessary, with undocumented patches, frail work-arounds or complete rewrites - a nightmare for records managers who had fought hard to keep Y2K remediation efforts from becoming a legal minefield of bad record keeping practices. All of the reasons which have been used in the past to ensure Y2K projects are well documented also apply for New Year's Eve, 1999. The question of how important this might be is an issue for every records manager to resolve.

"I wouldn't be surprised if some presence is required of relevant people," said David Lilley, records manager at the NSW Department of Fair Trading. "No doubt the IT guys will be around, but perhaps managers responsible for certain applications could well be [needed]."

Tony Newton, spokesperson for the State Records Authority of NSW, said State Government records managers had not been given specific instructions on what to do on the night, as there was not expected to be crashes given the amount of work that has gone into fixing the systems.

"If [records managers] have followed the requirements laid down in the guidelines, there shouldn't be a problem," he said.

Mr Newton said the possibility of requiring special backups to be performed just before the sensitive times would not be useful if the system collapsed.

"Pretty soon some business decisions will have to be made as to what is captured and what isn't," said Mr Lilley.

A more pressing concern for the Authority was the importance of retaining records of Y2K remediation work, which has now been solved by a General Disposal Authority document that instructs State Government agencies to store such records for at least 15 years,. The document says that in the event of equipment failure, retention of equipment acquisition records would also need to be "reviewed".