Archives New Zealand's Digital Continuity team are raising awareness of the Digital Continuity Action Plan among public sector agencies based in the regions.
Dunedin Regional Archivist, Peter Miller says he was delighted that the first Digital Continuity Action Plan Roadshow was held in Dunedin at the University of Otago’s Centre for Innovation (on Monday 28 September).
“A group of fourteen people attended from the University, local government, and public offices to hear Digital Continuity Manager Evelyn Wareham and Adviser Mick Crouch outline what has been achieved so far, future plans, and expectations for managing digital information efficiently in the future,” Peter Miller said.
Two of the biggest public sector agencies in Dunedin are the University of Otago and the Dunedin City Council. Evelyn met with them separately before the forum and says they both have a strong understanding of the work Archives New Zealand is doing with the Digital Continuity Action Plan. They have been assessing their current standards and policies around managing digital information she says but still had a few issues they needed to talk through.
“One of the big issues for the council is property records. With their current resources they anticipate it would take about 80 years to digitise what they hold. They are also worried about small councils and local authorities, whether managing their own digital records, from creation to archiving, may be too much for them without the resources the larger councils have.
“Otago University on the other hand has to think about how to manage data and records from academic research as well as the huge amounts of records they accumulate during the day-to-day administration of the university.
“Members of the record keeping community who attended the forum were also very interested in what we had to say. Some of them hadn’t really been thinking about it so it was all new information for them,” said Evelyn Wareham.
Feedback from the forum was positive with attendees saying it was “…very interesting and very impressive to hear of these developments…excellent, practical/demystifying/useful – made you feel you could do something” and that they "…Found the hints on how to deal with digital material in a practical way very helpful. It reinforced knowledge of practices we are doing, as well as giving us some further ideas to take this forward – setting polices, forming communities of practice."
The Roadshow will be in Christchurch 21 October, with visits to Auckland planned for November.