Victorian Electronic Records Strategy


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Standard
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Standard
(Version 2)
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Home > Standard > Standard (Version 2) > Advice 9 > Loss of recordkeeping system

4.5 Loss of recordkeeping system

4.5.1 The challenge

It does not appear to be widely appreciated that a recordkeeping system itself is another program. It holds records in proprietary data structures; in particular the metadata is often held in database tables separately from the record content. Loss of the recordkeeping system can consequently cause loss of the ability to display the records. The recordkeeping system can be lost for a number of reasons:

Abolition of the agency that runs the recordkeeping system. This may occur with little warning, particularly for short-lived agencies such as Royal Commissions. Usually the staff at agencies about to be closed have other priorities than ensuring the preservation of records.
Unplanned termination of service. This usually occurs because the hardware on which the recordkeeping system runs fails, and it is not considered economic to repair the hardware or relocate the recordkeeping system to another machine.
Planned termination of service. Sooner or later every program will be decommissioned, normally because it is no longer economic to run the application (e.g. due to license fees or because it is not worth relocating the application to a new machine). There should be plenty of warning that this is to occur, but this does not always happen.

For these reasons it is essential to plan for the export of records and to ensure that the records can be extracted from the system with little notice.

The export function must be built into the recordkeeping system from the time of commissioning. Extracting records from a recordkeeping system at short notice before the recordkeeping system is decommissioned is likely to be extremely expensive. Extracting records after the recordkeeping system has been decommissioned will be even more expensive, and may not be practical at all.

4.5.2 VERS approach

The VERS Standard requires the export function to be built into the recordkeeping system to achieve compliance. For permanent records, the VERS Standard requires the system to be capable of exporting records in the VERS Encapsulated Object (VEO) format.

Use of the export function requires the recordkeeping system to be operational. One way of implementing VERS, however, allows the recovery of records even after the recordkeeping system has ceased to function. If the VERS Encapsulated Object (VEO) is generated when the record is registered into the system, this means that it is possible to recover the record independently of the operation of the recordkeeping system. This is because the VEO contains the record content and the necessary metadata (e.g. the context and history) in one object. The VEO can be recovered from the file system without the recordkeeping system being operational.

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