State Records NSW has been given the go-ahead for a $A3.5 million program to implement a digital archives solution for the NSW state government.

Over the next three years it will hire a project team of six staff to upgrade its processes and systems to allow digital records to be accepted from NSW government departments and state authorities.

NSW is looking to travel the open source route, unlike the Public Records Office of Victoria (PROV), which adopted a commercial content management system, EMC Documentum.

Cassie Findlay, Senior Project Officer, Government Recordkeeping at State Records NSW, said, “Our proposal follows the National Archives model which has a very non-proprietary ethos. There are a range of storage management tools that are used in the research data field , such as Fedora, that we will be looking into.”

Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture) is an open source platform originally developed by researchers at Cornell University.

“This has been a project that has been a top priority for us for some time,” said Findlay.

“We are the state’s archive as well as the records regulator, but to date we’ve only had the capacity to accept physical records, hard copy.”

“Government is now creating a lot of born digital records, whether its email, documents or Web sites.”

“This will provide a whole of government solution to accept those digital records that agencies identify as requiring permanent preservation, once they have gone out of business use. That’s only a small percentage of the records they create, probably around 5%

NSW Auditor-General Peter Achterstraat warned in 2010 that the authority must establish "a government digital archiving solution" so that all public records provided to it are accessible.

"The 2009-11 memorandum on record-keeping acknowledged the increasing reliance upon digital records by NSW agencies," he said in his annual report to NSW Parliament on technology.

"Currently, the authority declines digital records that an agency wants to transfer for archiving because it does not have the infrastructure to access information in the record."

State Records is exploring options for digital infrastructure to manage and preserve the archive. It is is looking to utilise the Xena open source software developed by the National Archives of Australia, which converts proprietary files into open formats.

A new dedicated server room will house the master records, while a remote off-site backup facility will also be used to provide for Web access to records that are open for public access.

“When you are talking about establishing a permanent archive as we are, keeping things forever, it is important to ensure you limit the potential for proprietary control,” said Findlay.

“With digital preservation you have to adopt a range of approaches and be flexible, so we will also be storing all the records in bitstream as ones and zeroes so we have the opportunity to evolve our preservation techniques over time.