Government record-keeping is making progress in the land of the long white cloud, but the NZ Chief Archivist is pushing for the mandatory adoption of a new information and records management standard it has developed to improve the poor record-keeping within many public offices.

The Chief Archivist’s 2015/16 annual report to the NZ Minister of Internal Affairs also promotes the creation of a new role of Executive Sponsor within organisations to champion the importance of information and records management among an organisation’s leadership

“While Archives has improved our capability to accept the transfer of born-digital records as public archives, we are concerned that some public offices may not be able to prepare properly for these transfers.  If digital records cannot be readily prepared for transfer as public archives, this casts doubt on the effectiveness of their management prior to that point, when these records were needed to support current government business,” said Chief Archivist Marilyn Little.

Audits of the record-keeping practices of NZ Government agencies are undertaken every five years. The last audit was highly critical and found that “ barely half of the public offices audited in 2014/15 have record-keeping maturity at or above the level of a managed approach to records management.”

In 2015/16 Archives NZ partnered with a public office to investigate the technical and operational requirements for the transfer of born-digital records to Archives.  This was designed to develop and test end‑to‑end processes and support the development of guidance for public offices.  

“A notable characteristic of this partnership was that it involved digital records from an enterprise content management system used to manage older digital records migrated from systems that were inherited from predecessor public offices.  This type of record is often referred to as legacy information. 

“Archives developed a solution involving the enhancement of an existing model (used for e-accessions). The approach involved providing procedural guidance and templates to assist with planning, and tools to map the metadata provided by the public office into a format that could be processed by our current systems.  Detailed dialogue over the metadata and content proposed for transfer was required, as were clear plans for the various stages of the transfer. 

“Through the trial Archives sought to gain an improved understanding of the complex digital information management challenges faced in public offices by using a live test environment.  This will inform the guidance prepared for other public offices preparing for digital transfers.  The public office preparation for a transfer required a detailed analysis of the content and technical quality of the digital records to be transferred to Archives.”

“During the 2015/16 reporting period, one trial transfer was progressed up to the point of final transfer into Archives.  This transfer stopped at that point because the results indicated that more work is needed to be done to fully and effectively “sentence” born-digital records before the point of transfer.  Sentencing is the process of applying a disposal authority and its disposal actions to records.  These actions will generally be to destroy, retain for a specified period, or transfer to Archives. 

“The very large volume of records generated in digital systems multiplies the complexity of sentencing.  The multiple sources of the legacy information in this trial made systematic sentencing challenging for the public office.  Despite the care taken in previous content migrations, large sections of these legacy records lacked the metadata required as a foundation for successful sentencing and transfer.  The content, nature and value of the records could not be determined with sufficient confidence to sentence accurately.”

A second trial is planned during 2016-17 which will allow the public office to focus on pre-transfer work, notably sentencing, and provide a fuller test of Archives’ ability to make large transfers publicly available as public archives. 

Survey finds records shortfall

Archives surveyed public offices (except schools) and local authorities in three tranches in late 2016 and early 2017.  The short survey sought a whole-of-system view of information and records management and sought information about:

• the volumes and types of records being created and managed in government
• the capabilities and capacities that exist to manage records, both current and legacy
• the ability of public offices to prepare for the transfer of digital records to Archives. 

The Archives NZ survey found that:

• 57% had no current information asset register, or similar, 18% had one and 20 per cent were developing one.  Information asset registers can provide a fundamental layer of knowledge about information assets to assist with continuity, removal of duplication, sharing and releasing, and managed disposal.
• 31% could not provide an estimate of the total quantity of their digital information holdings.  40% could not provide a full picture of which systems their digital information is held in. 
• While many survey responses included physical information storage cost estimates, fewer could identify or usefully estimate digital storage costs.  The ability to state or estimate the size of these holdings was also variable. 
• 70% reported that they are still holding information in shared drives, which is of concern because the ability to capture key metadata is limited.
• Only 39% were capturing the minimum mandatory metadata specified in the Standard.         

The full report may be viewed at Report: State of Government Recordkeeping and Public Records Act 2005 2015/16.