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VERS STORY | STANDARD | ASSESSMENT | PROJECTS | DIGITAL ARCHIVE | TRAINING | TOOLKIT | PUBLICATIONS | |
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2.2 The Victorian Electronic Records Strategy report In 1998 the second stage of VERS commenced. The Victorian Government, through the Victorian Microeconomic Reform program, funded a technical trial of a data-driven approach to preserving electronic records. The goal of the project was the construction of a demonstration records management system that captured, encapsulated, and managed electronic records. This involved:
This stage was contracted to CSIRO, who subcontracted Ernst and Young to carry out process modelling within the Department of Infrastructure. An emphasis of the project was on the capture of electronic records automatically from workflows. This reflected a recommendation of the original report that electronic records should be captured into a recordkeeping system as soon after creation as possible. Although successful in capturing high-quality records with little effort from users, this aspect of VERS was subsequently de-emphasised, as few processes in government were sufficiently well defined and important enough to justify the cost of constructing automated workflow. The emphasis in subsequent projects swung to the adhoc capture of records. However, a significant benefit of the interaction with the Department of Infrastructure during this project was an emphasis on the joint recordkeeping requirements of both agencies and the archive. VERS was not envisaged as just a strategy merely for an archive, but something that would aid agencies in their use of records. The key was an understanding that in order to ensure the preservation of electronic records, it was necessary to ensure that government agencies were creating records with appropriate content and metadata. This emphasis was given greater weight during a subsequent phase of VERS when a pilot system was implemented in the Department of Infrastructure. The project successfully demonstrated the encapsulation of electronic records and set the technical basis for VERS. It was during this project that the technical approach used by VERS was developed. This included the development of the VERS Encapsulated Object (VEO) and the initial selection of a long-term preservation format. The result of this project was the report 'Victorian Electronic Records Strategy' [PROV2], released in 1999. The report concluded that:
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