Church Preserves Precious Records of African Nation

Church Preserves Precious Records of African Nation. Newsroom. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. 28 September 2017.  [YouTube]
     In Freetown, Sierra Leone, paper records dating back to the early 1800s are disintegrating at an alarming rate due to poor storage conditions, heat, humidity and frequent handling. The staff often pool money just to keep the lights on one or two days a week and were making a “frantic effort” to preserve copies of records by hand. “I had my heart broken because of the conditions of how these records are kept and the way that the people are working here, giving the best of themselves to preserve what they can for people and families of Sierra Leone.”  Despite valiant efforts by dedicated caretakers, rampant deterioration of the tattered records threatened to obliterate the very history of the nation. This changed with a plea from the government of Sierra Leone to the LDS president, asking for help in preserving the at-risk records.

The Church approved a project to image the dilapidated birth and death records and make them available online. FamilySearch has began the process of digitizing records in Freetown and in towns and remote villages across the country, and works with interfaith leaders such as The Catholic Church which has opened its record vaults to be part of the preservation project. “Any kind of record at all is crucially important because it becomes a database for future generations.” The preservation project will preserve some 4 million records.  FamilySearch is engaged in similar digitizing projects in countries all over Africa.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Electronic Records Management Guidelines: Long-Term Preservation

Electronic Records Management Guidelines: Long-Term Preservation. March 2012, Version 5. Minnesota Historical Society. [Guidelines - Contents]

     Over the course of time, organizations generate many records. Some are of short term duration while others are to be kept permanently. “Tools such as migration, conversion, metadata, and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) will help you not only preserve your records, but also realize their full value.” Records need to be preserved, since “the greatest possible access to certain government information and data is essential to allow citizens to participate fully in a democratic system of government.”   

Some key concepts presented in the section on Long-Term Preservation:

1. Needs Assessment. Understanding the value of the records and the information they contain will help guide decisions, determine their retention requirements, the access and use of the records, as well as preservation options. 
2. Physical Storage Options. Record access requirements will help determine the type of storage to use, specifically
1. Online storage. Immediately available on the network
2. Near-line storage.  Records are stored in automated optical disk or tapes libraries attached to a network.
3. Offline storage.  Records are stored on removable media that must be retrieved manually.
3. File Format Options. For long-term file preservation, non-proprietary formats are preferred, but they also have limitations.
4. Digital Preservation Techniques. There are several approaches to ensure that electronic records remain useful over time.
1. Emulation. Using emulator programs to simulate the behavior, of original programs.
2. Encapsulation. Combining the object to be preserved with all of the necessary details of how to interpret it within a wrapper or package.
3. Migration. This is the more common approach, which is the process of  moving files to new media or computer systems to maintain their use. 
5. Preservation Planning.  “A preservation plan should address an institution’s overall preservation goals and provide a framework that defines the methods used to reach those goals.  At a minimum, the plan should define the collections covered by the plan, list the requirements of the records, practices and standards that are being followed, documentation of policies and procedures related to preservation activities, and staff responsibility for each preservation action.” This plan needs constant updating and cost/benefits must be addressed. Policies should be developed to put the plan into practice.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Electronic Records Task Force Phase 2 Final Report

Electronic Records Task Force Phase 2 Final Report. John Butler, et al. University of Minnesota. August 23, 2017. [PDF, 68 pp.]
     The University of Minnesota Libraries sponsored an Electronic Records Task Force to monitor established workflows and to develop new workflows, policies, procedures and mechanisms for processing and providing access to electronic records. They are focused on the development of processing activities, best practices and guidelines. Creating finding aids, which are published online through ArchivesSpace, are the first step in providing access to electronic records. The long-term preservation of electronic records is a concern and this effort continues to be a work-in-progress. To keep up with the influx of electronic records, the Electronic Records Task Force provides the following recommendations:

1. Staffing: Hire a permanent full time employee to work exclusively with electronic records
2. Long-term Management: Create an Electronic Records Management Group to address ongoing electronic records needs
3. Preservation: Review current workflows and long-term management requirements to address immediate and long-term solutions for file backup, recovery, and preservation according to policies and standards
4. Security: Conduct a thorough review of security requirements
5. Equipment: Establish initial and ongoing financial support for hardware, software and collections
6. Access to Materials: Explore options for providing access to electronic records, including both access and preservation of these materials.

Project Tasks and Deliverables

1. Develop Workflows for Processing Ingested Collections
2. Define Processing Levels (minimal, intermediate, full)
3. Develop Access Methods that Address End-user Needs, Copyright, Data Privacy and other Information Security Requirements
4. Monitor Ingest Workflows and adjust as necessary

Additional notes:

• "In the long-term, a full-time dedicated staff person is the most responsible approach to working effectively and efficiently, to achieve quality work, and to maintain our leadership role in the field of electronic records management. This is arguably the only way to address the ingest and processing activities that assist with long-term access to and preservation of electronic materials. Without a dedicated person who has an in-depth understanding of evolving workflows and protocols and who can provide a consistent approach with curatorial staff, any headway in addressing the records being collected will be made slowly."
• The goal of processing unique electronic archival material is to make it available to end users, whether they be skilled researchers or a high school student working on a project.
• Given divergent requirements, a singular asset management, backup, and preservation solution may not be a feasible goal in either the near or long term. However, efforts can be made to establish a limited number of processes to manage the vast majority of preservation use cases.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Universal Electronic Records Management Requirements

Universal Electronic Records Management Requirements. Courtney Anderson. National Archives Records Express. August 4, 2017.
     The National Archives has released the Universal Electronic Records Management Requirements as part of the Federal Electronic Records Modernization Initiative (FERMI). Universal ERM Requirements identify high level business needs for managing electronic records. The program requirements are derived from existing NARA regulations, policy, and guidance and are a starting point for agencies to use when developing system requirements. "Records management staff should work with acquisitions and IT personnel to tailor any final system requirements". The document contains an abstract, a glossary, and lists of lifecycle requirements and transfer format requirements.
There are six sections based on the lifecycle of electronic records management:

1.    Capture
2.    Maintenance and Use
3.    Disposal
4.    Transfer
5.    Metadata
6.    Reporting

The requirements are either “program” requirements, relating to the design and implementation of policies and procedures, or “system” requirements, providing technical guidance for creating or acquiring ERM tools, which also indicate “Must Have” or “Should Have”. NARA will be supporting these requirements going forward and will be updating them to stay current with changes in technology, regulations and guidance products.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Managing the preservation and accessibility of public records from the past into the digital future

Managing the preservation and accessibility of public records from the past into the digital future.  Dean Koh. Open Gov.  30 November 2016.
     A post about the Public Record Office of the State Archives of Victoria. They have many paper records but now also a lot of born digital records governments, so the archives is a hybrid paper and digital archives. For accessibility purposes, paper records are digitised to provide online access. The Public Record Office also sets records management standards for government agencies across Victoria. "In the digital environment, there is not a lot of difference between records and information so that means we set standards in the area of information management as well." Access to records is a major focus, including equity of access in a digitally focused age.

"There’s a lot to access that isn’t necessarily ‘just digitise something’, there’s a lot of work to be done in addition to just digitising them. There’s capturing metadata about the digital images because again, if I just take photographs of a whole lot of things and send you the files, that’s not very accessible, you have to open each one and look at it in order to find the one that you want. So we have to capture metadata about each of the images in order to make them accessible so a lot of thinking and work goes into that."

Another issue around records, particularly born digital records, is the different formats used to create records in government. There are a "whole bunch of different technologies" used to create born digital records and the archives is trying to manage the formats and the records so that they "continue to remain accessible into the far future. So 50 years, a 100 years, 200 years, they still need to be accessible because those records are of enduring value to people of Victoria. So that’s a format issue and a format obsolescence issue."

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Document Life Cycle Road to Digital Preservation and Archiving

The Document Life Cycle Road to Digital Preservation and Archiving. Brett Claffee. Document Strategy. Aug. 18 2016.
     What is the difference between documents and records in today’s digital enterprises? Documents do not become records until they are declared a record. "When a document is first created, it is under its author’s control and typically goes into a workflow, put simply—a document life cycle".  When a document is declared a record, it moves from the author’s control to corporate control under the retention schedule, which determines what eventually happens to the record. Typically, a document’s life cycle involves these phases:

• Creation
• Management
• Storage
• Retrieval
• Distribution
• Disposal

When a document is declared a record, it "becomes subject to corporate control and cannot be destroyed until it meets all of its retention obligations, including being released from any legal, financial, or regulatory holds". Record types with long-term retention requirements may be kept permanently.

There are differences between digital preservation and archiving and how they look at documents and record life cycles. Records life cycle adds retention and archiving as a phase,which includes document destruction as part of the document life cycle.

The digital archiving and preservation is a multi-layered process, that deals with "provenance and authentication practices, to chain of custody and accountability, to format transformations—all designed to keep information legitimate, useful, and, if required for long-term retention, preserved". With the large volume of data inf recent years, data archiving has come to the forefront. It is estimated that there are more than 30 billion documents used each year in the United States. Archiving provides five critical advantages:

1. Ensuring regulatory compliance for data retention, data immutability, and audit trails
2. Improving performance and productivity of current business applications
3. Making archived records widely available and easy to retrieve by authorized users
4. Removing the problems of maintaining obsolete systems just for the data
5. Reducing IT costs and time for back-up, upgrades, and other needs

For records, organizations can follow a retention schedule, but a retention schedule for documents and data are not as clear. The life span of these are often looked at in terms of use, informatics and analytics. A life cycle approach can assure consistent control.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Selection and Appraisal in the OAIS Model

Selection and Appraisal in the OAIS Model. Ed Pinsent. DART Blog. 7 September 2016.
     The post asks if the OAIS Model accommodate the skills of selection and appraisal, then suggests that it cannot.  The Model presents an over-simplified view where in a state that is all ready to preserve, which ignores the beginning processes.There is a need to define the pre-ingest stage in OAIS, but there needs to be  a greater recognition of the archivists' Selection and Appraisal skills, can have tremendous value in digital preservation. Archivists assess the value of the content in a contextual framework, based on other records in the archive and in the context of provenance. It requires an understanding of context, provenance, record series, to help identify the potential value of content. A Series model is the "foundation for all Archival arrangement, and is the cornerstone of our profession". It is difficult to see where the record / archival series is in all this.  "The integrity and contextual meaning of a collection is being overlooked, in favour of this atomised digital-object view.

OAIS, if strictly interpreted, could bypass the Series altogether in favour of an assembly line workflow that simply processes one digital object after another."  The blog post asserts that there is a need to rediscover the value of Appraisal and Selection and its importance in the digital realm. 

Digital Preservation Matters.

Preserving Transactional Data

Preserving Transactional Data. Sara Day Thomson. DPC Technology Watch Report 16-02. May 2016.
     This report examines the requirements for preserving transactional data and the challenges in re-using these data for analysis or research.   Transactional will be used to refer to "data that result from single, logical interactions with a database and the ACID properties (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) that support reliable records of interactions."

Transactional data, created through interactions with a database, can come from many sources and different types of information. "Preserving  transactional data, whether large or not, is imperative for the future usability of big data, which is often comprised of many sources of transactional data.  Such data have potential for future developments in consumer analytics and in academic research and "will only lead to new discoveries and insights if they are effectively curated and preserved to ensure appropriate reproducibility."

The organizations who collect transactional data aim to manage and preserve collected data for business purposes as part of their records management. There are strategies for database preservation as well as tools and standards  that can look at data re-use. The strategies for managing and preserving big transactional data must adapt to both SQL and NoSQL environments. Some significant challenges include the large amounts of data, rapidly changing data, and different sources of data creation. 

Some notes:

• understanding the context and how the data were created may be critical in preserving the meaning behind the data
• data purpose: preservation planning is critical in order to make preservation actions fit for purpose while keeping preservation cost and complexity to a minimum
• how data are collected or created can have an impact on long-term preservation, particularly when database systems have multiple entry points, leading to inconsistency and variable data quality.
• Current technical approaches to preserving transactional data primarily focus on the preservation of databases. 
• Database preservation may not capture the complexities and rapid changes enabled by new technologies and processing methods 
• As with all preservation planning, the relevance of a specific approach depends on the organization’s objectives.

There are several approaches to preserving databases:

• Encapsulation
• Emulation 
• Migration/Normalization

• Archival Data Description Markup Language (ADDML)
• Standard Data Format for Preservation (SDFP) 
• Software Independent Archiving of Relational Databases (SIARD)

"Practitioners of database preservation typically prefer simple text formats based on open standards. These include flat files, such as Comma Separated Value (CSV), annotated textual documents, such as Extended Markup Language (XML), and the international and open Structured Query Language (SQL)." The end-goal is to keep data in a transparent and vendor-neutral database so they can be  reintegrated into a future database.

Best practices:

1. choose the best possible format, either preserving the database in its original format or migrating to an alternative format.
2. after a database is converted, encapsulate it by adding descriptive, technical, and other relevant documentation to understand the preserved data.
3. submit database to a preservation environment that will curate it over time.

Research is continuing in the collection, curation, and analysis of data; digital preservation standards and best practices will make the difference between just data and "curated collections of rich information".

Digital Preservation Matters.

Keep Calm and do Practical Records Preservation

Keep Calm and do Practical Records Preservation. Matthew Addis. Conference on European Electronic Data Management and eHealth Topics. 23 May 2016.
     The presentation looks at some of the practical tools and approaches that can be used to ensure that digital content remains safe, secure, accessible and readable over multiple decades. It covers  mostly "practical and simple steps towards doing digital preservation for electronic content" but also some ways to determine how well prepared you are for preservation.  Some things you need to show:

• ongoing integrity and authenticity of content in an auditable way.
• that content is secured and access is controlled.
• ability to access content when needed that is readable and understandable.
• ability to do this over decades, which is a very long time in the IT world 
• have an archivist with clear responsibility for making all this happen
• have appropriate processes that manage all the risks proportionally.

A really simple definition of Digital Preservation from the Library of Congress: "the management of content in a pro-active way so that it remains accessible and usable over time." 

"Focus on the basic steps that need to be done now in order to support something bigger and better in the future." Know what you have and get the precious stuff in a safe storage environment.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Governance of Long-Term Digital Information

The Governance of Long-Term Digital Information. IGI 2016 Benchmark. Information Governance Initiative. May 18, 2016. [PDF]
     “The critical role of digital . . .archives in ensuring the future accessibility of information with enduring value has taken a back seat to enhancing access to current and actively used materials. As a consequence, digital preservation remains largely experimental and replete with the risks . . . representing a time bomb that threatens the long-term viability of [digital archives].”

1. We have a problem. Nearly every organization has digital information they want to keep for 10 or more years.
2. The problem is technological, most often a storage problem.
3. The problem is business related. It is not related to just archives, libraries or museums. 
4. The problem is a legal problem. Legal requirements are the main reason organizations keep 
digital information longer than ten years
5. We know what we must do, but are we doing it? In a survey 97 percent said they are aware that digital information is at risk of obsolescence but three fourths are just thinking about it or have no strategy. Only 16% have a standards-based digital preservation system.

• “Most records today are born digital."
• Digital assets should be considered business-critical information and steps taken to keep them usable long into the future
• Most organizations are not storing their long-term digital assets in a manner sufficient to ensure their long-term protection and accessibility.
   

How are they being kept? According to a survey:

• Shared Network Drive                                68%
• Business Applications (e.g. CRM, ERP)        52%
• Enterprise Content Management System     47%
• Disk or Tape Backup Systems                      44%
• Records Management System                      43%
• Application-specific Archiving (e.g. email)  33%
• Removable Media (e.g. CD or USB)              22%
• Enterprise Archiving System                       14%
• Long-term Digital Preservation System        11%
• Other                                                          9%
• Commodity Cloud Storage (e.g. Amazon)      8%
• I don't know                                                 1%

Where to start? Some recommendations:

• Triage right now the materials that are in serious danger of being lost, damaged, or rendered inaccessible.
• Conduct a formal assessment so that you can benefit from strategic planning and economies of scale.
• Address the Past, Protect the Future
• Catalog the Consequences of not being able to access and rely upon your own information
• Build Your Rules for Protection and accessibility
• Assess the IT Environment

Digital Preservation Matters.

National Archives permits us to learn from mistakes

National Archives permits us to learn from mistakes. Peter Charleton, Supreme Court judge. The Irish Times. Feb 8, 2016.
      For the National Archives in Ireland, 1922 was a disaster. A direct hit from artillery destroyed centuries of records. The census records from 1821 through to 1891 were almost completely destroyed. Since then, the National Archives has tried to supplement its damaged holdings, but what has been lost is gone forever. With many places moving from paper to digital records history is on the point of repeating itself. The traditional policy of printing files to preserve a digital record no longer works. Files may be on several computers in several iterations; they may have "elements in office systems, email, even text messages or a tweet." With digital, there is a lot of data, which brings a challenge of what to preserve.  But not every record needs preservation.

To ensure records the preservation of long-term records, the records should be transferred to the National Archives. Permanent records need to be identified early and treated appropriately.  Creation of a digital archive will greatly reduce the volume of records that government departments store. "Millions are spent by departments on off-site storage and back-ups of network drives. By investing in a digital archive, departments will be able to transfer emails, business files, digital images and other electronic records to the National Archives. An efficient approach to records management based on legal obligation can target policy effectively."  Money should be directed to the National Archives for developing an efficient system so there are sufficient resources to capture, manage and preserve our digital heritage. This institution, the precious repository of this nation, deserves to be supported in ensuring Ireland continues to have a history.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Risk management guide for the secure disposal of electronic records

Secure destruction of electronic records. Archives New Zealand. 2 October 2015.
     Blog post on the secure and complete destruction of electronic records plus all copies and backups. Destruction of paper records are mostly straightforward. However it is not so easy to confidently delete electronic records. The processes to destroy digital records should be secure, irreversible, planned, documented and verifiable.  The article has examples of risks of not destroying records,  as well as resources on how to implement the destruction records. In addition there is a new guide on the benefits of disposal and the risks of not disposing of records: Risk management guide for disposal of records.

[Disposal and destruction of digital records may not seem like it has anything to do with digital preservation, but it is an important part of records management. More than just that, it can be a needed part of the submission and ingest processes made multiple copies of sensitive content have been created before or while adding the content.  Or if you have been given media to add and then must dispose of the media afterwards. -cle]

Digital Preservation Matters.

Asimov, Archives and Records

Asimov, Archives and Records. Chris Erickson. August 12, 2015.
     When I started working with digital preservation, a co-worker referred me to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Several passages in two of the books sounded very much like what we are dealing with now, though the time frames are much longer.  Here are some quotes from those books I thought interesting:

Foundation, pp. 34-35.

• "Q. How do you propose to do this?"
• "A. By saving the knowledge of the race. The sum of human knowing is beyond any one man; any thousand men. With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of exceedingly tiny facets of what there is to know. They will be helpless and useless by themselves. The bits of lore, meaningless, will not be passed on. They will be lost through the generations. But, if we now prepare a giant summary of all knowledge, it will never be lost. Coming generations will build on it, and will not have to rediscover it for themselves...." 
•  "Why, then, should we concern ourselves with events of three centuries distance?” 
• "I shall not be alive half a decade hence,” said Seldon, “and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, ‘humanity.’ ”

Foundation and Earth, pp. 5, 11, 15.

• "Those myths and legends are all there are. There are no actual records, no documents.”
• “Documents twenty thousand years old? Things decay, perish, are destroyed through inefficiency or war.”
• “But there should be records of the records; copies, copies of the copies, and copies of the copies of the copies; useful material much younger than twenty millennia. They have been removed."
• "Those documents are referred to in known historical records, but the documents no longer exist in the Galactic Library. The references to them may exist, but any quotations from them do not exist.”
• "You cannot have a reasonable civilization without records of some kind."
• "A civilization in being is not likely to destroy its early records. Far from judging them to be archaic and unnecessary, they are likely to treat them with exaggerated reverence and would labor to preserve them."

(And another site with similar quotes). Preservationists aren't looking that far ahead yet, but with the research into permanent storage technology that is being done, records and archives could be permanent.

Digital Preservation Matters.

Information Governance Offers a Strategic Approach for Healthcare

Information Governance Offers a Strategic Approach for Healthcare. Lesley Kadlec, et al. Journal of AHIMA. October 2014.
     Information governance is emerging as a strategy that helps organizations achieve their goals. Successful organizations realize that information is a valuable asset and must be carefully managed throughout the information life cycle. The purpose of information governance is two-fold:

1. Stewardship of information 
2. Using information to achieve organization goals

The American Health Information Management Association defines information governance as: "The enterprise-wide framework for managing information throughout its lifecycle and supporting the organization’s strategy, operations, regulatory, legal, risk and environmental requirements." Information governance is an enterprise-wide program that requires leadership and support from the organization’s executive leaders. This is vital in order to focus on assessing risks, evaluating needs, and putting together policies, procedures, and tools. Since retention and information storage is very costly to manage, it is important to manage the information effectively to eliminate redundancy and information that is no longer needed.Sustainability is the key to long term success. Good planning and vision are needed to start a program. Stakeholders need to be involved, as well as ongoing communication, training, auditing, and reporting.

Related posts:

• Information Governance: Why Digital Preservation Should Be a Part of Your IG Strategy
• Managing Chaos Through Digital Governance
• AHRQ Public Access to Federally Funded Research

Digital Preservation Matters.

Toolkit for Managing Electronic Records

Toolkit for Managing Electronic Records. National Archives and Records Administration. May 13, 2015 updated.
The Toolkit for Managing Electronic Records is a spreadsheet that provides descriptions of a collection of guidance products for managing electronic records. It includes tools and resources that have been developed by NARA and other organizations. The separate tabs can be sorted or searched as needed.

Digital Preservation Matters.

OAI-PMH harvesting from SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 to Primo.  Cillian Joy. Tech Blog. July 2014.
They have a system to manage the submission, storage, approval, and discovery of taught thesis documents., which uses SharePoint 2010 as a the document repository and Exlibris Primo as the discovery tool. The solution uses PHP, XML, XSLT, CURL, and SharePoint REST API using oData.
Uses standards ATOM and OAI-PMH.

SharePoint 2013 .NET Server, CSOM, JSOM, and REST API index

Digital Preservation Matters.

ARMA 2014: The Convergence of Records Management and Digital Preservation

ARMA 2014: The Convergence of Records Management and Digital Preservation. Howard Loos, Chris Erickson. October 2014. [PDF]
Presentation on records management and digital preservation given at the ARMA 2014 conference.
Notes:

• Records Management mission: To assist departments in fulfilling their responsibility to identify and manage records and information in accordance with legal, regulatory, and operational requirements
• RIM Life Cycle to DP Life Cycle
• Challenges and successful approaches
• Storing records permanently with M-Discs
• Introduction to Digital Preservation, challenges, format sustainability, media obsolescence, metadata, organizational challenges,
• Life of digital media
• Best practices and processes
• OAIS model
• Rosetta Digital Preservation System
• Library of Congress Digital Preservation Outreach & Education (DPOE) Network

Digital Preservation Matters.

Digital documents debut on historically endangered list.

Digital documents debut on historically endangered list. MaineBiz. August 30, 2012.

Digital documents debut on historically endangered list for the first time, Maine's most endangered historical assets now include digital records, according to an annual survey by the nonprofit Maine Preservation. This was done to emphasize the importance of the preservation of these documents to others. Electronic documents are in particular danger because of the ease with which they can be lost or destroyed. "We've not figured out how to manage this material. There's such a proliferation that nobody thinks about this material."
 

Digital Preservation Matters.

An interactive eGuide: Backup Solutions

 An interactive eGuide: Backup Solutions. Computerworld. June 2012. [PDF]

Disaster recovery is the ability to continue your mission-critical operations after an interruption of some kind. An organization must be able to restore applications and processes to the point where they were before the outage occurred. Organizations “with a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan have the ability to get back to a semblance of normalcy in a much shorter span of time than those without.”

Instead of focusing on technology,  put disaster recovery processes in place; prepare for the most likely causes of downtime. Decide what is most important. Store your data away from your physical site in the event of a natural disaster.  Develop strategies to address operational continuity,  IT recovery, and communication needs.   Understand all parts of the backup procedures.

• Test your backup/recovery (including cloud backup) at least one a year and make sure it actually works the way you want it to.
• Keep install files for your software, including security keys.

“Backup is really the insurance policy that you hope you never have to cash.

Digital Preservation Matters.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Records Retention

The Seven Deadly Sins of Records Retention.  Sarah D. Scalet. CSO Security and Risk.  July 01, 2006.

 Legal actions in the past few years have made document retention programs important. One wrong step can cost an organization money.  Some have concluded that they should archive, forever, anything and everything to be on the safe side. But keeping too much information is a risk too, as you can expose yourself to litigation risks, and possibly violating privacy rights. 

1.       Not keeping your records straight from your backup.

• The first step to a good records management program is simply identifying what a record is. E-mail servers and network drives get backed up to keep the business running. But a record is "something that you need to keep around for a set period of time, either for regulatory, legal or business reasons. Records encompass both structured information, like financial transactions ... and unstructured information, like financial spreadsheets." 
• "while backup media may be in a continual state of being written and overwritten, records that must legally be retained often need to be stored on immutable, nonrewritable storage, and should be either very well-organized, very easily searched or both.

2.       Expecting the legal department to produce a rule of thumb for how long to store records.

3.       Assuming that document retention is someone else's job.

4.       Not being able to respond quickly to a request.

5.       Having a policy you can't follow.

6.       Failing to offer guidance on how to destroy old records.

7.       Telling people to delete information at the wrong time.

Start with an accurate survey of the information that's in the organization, a data map.
"At the end of the day, you have to have some sort of written policy around it."

Digital Preservation Matters.