Piloting a Documentation Framework for Digital Preservation at the National Archives of Singapore
Kevin Wong
In the leadup to the launch of its digital preservation system, the Records Management (RM) department of the National Archives of Singapore (NAS) is reviewing its current digital preservation operations to identify steps that could be taken to enable the operations to be scaled up.
 
The RM department oversees the digital preservation of government records transferred to NAS. In general, preservation-related decisions are currently recorded by the department in the following manner:
 
1.     Formal documentation containing instructions or high-level policy tailored for communication to government agencies. – Only major decisions are generally recorded while minor decisions and contextual information deemed unsuitable or irrelevant for external communication are usually excluded.
 
2.     Emails documenting decisions on specific activities or actions. – Easily lost as emails accumulate over time and emails containing decisions are mingled with emails which do not.
 
To ensure that there is a more structured framework to document decisions, NAS is currently piloting a documentation framework for digital preservation. Decisions made during preservation activities are recorded using a template based on the Architectural Decision Record (ADR) methodology. Where a decision is important enough that a higher-level policy or workflow document must be updated, this update is also recorded using a template based on ADR.
 
By implementing such a framework, NAS hopes to,
 
Implement preservation plans more consistently without duplication of work,
Improve governance and accountability for decision making,
Ensure institutional knowledge is retained, allowing new staff to learn and understand past decisions.
 
An important aspect of this pilot is to try and minimise the number of changes required to existing practices to not disrupt current operations. Existing documentation will be incorporated, while recording of operational decisions will carry on more intentionally and moved from email to ADR-based templates.
 
This lightning talk describes this pilot documentation framework for digital preservation and takeaways from the experience so far.
governance, resourcing, and management for dp scaling up