Season’s greetings and best wishes for the New Year from the Government Recordkeeping Team at Archives New Zealand.
The last Government recordkeeping forum of the year was held at the National Library Auditorium on Wednesday 6 December. The topic of Digital Preservation and Website Archiving obviously hit the spot as there were 196 registrations for the event and some 160 attendees. The speakers included representatives from the National Digital Heritage Archive (National Library), Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry as well as from Archives New Zealand. Presentations will soon be available online.
A number of people have suggested to us that it would be a good idea to form an Electronic Document and Records Management System interest group for records managers. This would be a community of practice for information professionals who are interested in, are implementing, or are thinking of implementing an eDRMS, and want to share the experience. If you are interested please contact us at: rkadvice@archives.govt.nz.
We recently issued a fourth General Disposal Authority (GDA). These authorities cover records which are common across government, rather than those that are specific to a particular agency. The new GDA covers low-level administration and corporate services records. This GDA can be used by all departments, state-owned enterprises, and Crown entities, including tertiary institutions and district health boards. There is no sign-on process, but alterations of existing schedules might be needed. You can find more information at our Records Appraisal and Disposal page.
We have also developed an Index to the General Disposal Authorities. This is an alphabetical list of records classes covered by the GDAs, with cross-references. We developed this in response to client feedback that it was sometimes difficult to find a particular record class. It should increase the overall usability of the GDAs. The index is available on the Continuum website.
Public consultation on the digitisation standard is now completed. There was a great deal of interest in the standard — we received 52 submissions. Thank you to all who contributed. The final version of the standard is due for issue by the Chief Archivist in January.
In November this year, the digitisation standard was also included in the State Services Commission’s e-Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF), with ‘under development’ status. We plan to seek inclusion of further electronic recordkeeping standards in the e-GIF as they are developed.
The Archives New Zealand library holds New Zealand’s most comprehensive collection of archival and records management texts and serials. It contains books and journals on conservation and preservation, archives management, records management, archives and records theory and history. The material ranges from very basic ‘how to’ manuals to high level theory. The library catalogue is now available online. We encourage you to check it out. Subscriptions to the library, and inter-library loan, are available on request.
Almost all of our Continuum recordkeeping advice publications have now been updated for the Public Records Act 2005. Update packs for your Continuum Kit are available from Archives New Zealand. The update includes 11 new fact sheets and a Guide to the Public Records Act with a handy compliance checklist. More details about the update, and an order form, are available on our Continuum Update Project page.
New Zealand is now a joint member of IT-021, the Australian Standards Committee on records management. Any standards produced by the committee will be joint Australian/New Zealand standards. The work of developing standards is largely undertaken at sub-committee level, and IT-021 is looking for greater New Zealand expert participation in the sub-committee development work. These subcommittees include work process analysis, compliance, metadata, AGLS, records classification, physical storage of non-current records, integration of digitisation, systems migration, functional analysis, and an initial review of AS/ISO15489. If you are interested please contact Kevin Molloy at kevin.molloy@archives.govt.nz for more details.
This year Archives New Zealand undertook a census of public offices using the mandatory reporting powers under Section 31 of the PRA. We surveyed 217 entities, including all departments, all Crown entities except schools, all state-owned enterprises, and all offices of parliament. More than 94% had responded before the end of the survey period. The key results from this survey were summarised in our Annual Report on the State of Government Recordkeeping, which forms part of our Annual Report. A copy of the Annual Report is available online.
The report makes six key recommendations for public offices. In brief, these recommendations are:
Recordkeeping enquiries: rkadvice@archives.govt.nz
Appraisal enquiries: appraisal@archives.govt.nz
Transfer enquiries: transfer@archives.govt.nz
Physical address: PO Box 12-050 / 10 Mulgrave St, Wellington