Te tīmatanga whakawhiti matihiko - Te whakatakanga 

Digital transfer initiation readiness

We can provide advice and guidance on tools and methods your public sector organisation can use to assess the readiness of eligible digital information and records (digital records) for transfer to us. The following activities are useful for your organisation to understand the current digital health of your records and how well they’re being managed for digital continuity. These activities underpin a successful transfer as they help you discover — and address in advance — any potential issues that may affect ingest or transfer of your digital records into the Government Digital Archive.

Useful links

• Digital transfer process quick guide (see Step 2)

Before initiating a conversation with us about a digital transfer, you need to understand the current digital health of your organisation’s digital records. This includes identifying any unique file formats and potential digital preservation issues.

Duplication

There may be some duplication in the records. We encourage you to assess the risk of this and dispose of duplicates prior to transfer. Duplication can also occur if the records were created at a time when your organisation’s information management policy was ‘print-to-file’. This can create considerable work in identifying what constitutes the ‘authoritative’ version — the digital or paper record.

Automated tools

You can use free automated software tools such as DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) to identify:

• which file formats you hold — particularly any old or obsolete formats and unusual format modifications

• duplicates and versions — this can be done by generating and comparing checksum values for each digital record

• layers of content, such as embedded objects

• system files

• missing files

• empty folders.

This can also help you reduce data storage and retrieval costs.

Other tools such as SQLint or Demystify can be used to discover more details about the digital records intended for transfer. They can also be used to:

• quality check the accuracy and consistency of content sentencing (for example, showing timelines based on last modification dates)

• locate obvious sensitive, non-business related and or draft material by listing potentially problematic words or characters in file and folder names.

This will help you with identifying and managing any access risks.

Find out more about the tools we use for content analysis that you can use too

At a minimum, we expect you to provide the mandatory metadata elements required by the Information and records management standard.

Although we currently have no fixed requirements for the structure of a transfer metadata file (TMF), we do recommend that the TMF:

• uses UTF-8 coding

• has file folder names free of non-standard characters (only ASCII), and

• most importantly, is understood by someone in your organisation who can help us in mapping to our systems.

For each digital record included in the transfer, the TMF must include the following metadata elements:

• checksum value (generated using one of the methods outlined below)

• file path (a complete pathway to the relevant record within the transfer extract — not the pathway as it was in the original pre-transfer system).

Useful links

• Metadata

Checksums

Checksum values can be generated by DROID as well as other free online tools, such as:

• Free Commander (Windows)

• SHA1SUM or MD5SUM (Linux).

We’ll identify any technical metadata we need to enable the preservation of the digital records. You can also provide any extra metadata you may need to add value and enable discovery of the records.

This metadata — when open — will appear on Collections search. Collections search provides access to digital public archives held in the Government Digital Archive, so members of the public can search, browse and find relevant information and records.

Useful links

Checksums overview