Cloudy Data With a Chance of Transfer: Towards SharePoint Transfer at UK Parliament
Emily Chen
Since 2020 the day-to-day business of UK Parliament has moved to predominantly cloud-based ways of working and collaboration. It has moved away from using an on-premise Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) with data stored on network and personal drives; to a cloud-based Office 365 environment with the teams from both Houses storing and sharing data in OneDrive and SharePoint. This move created a need for a solution to transferring information of archival value out of its cloud based collaborative platform and into long-term storage and preservation whilst retaining the context within which they were created.
Transfer of information is complicated by the nature of cloud-based collaboration and storage in several ways. Firstly, when files can be viewed, edited, stored and shared by multiple users concurrently, it can be difficult to establish what the authoritative version of a file is. Secondly, with the proliferation of user applied metadata tags and labels, the context in which the files were created form as much a part of the archival record as the files themselves. Thirdly, there is the question of how to validate and authenticate files extracted from the cloud.
The preservation of this data moves away from preserving just the individual file to capturing the file and its contextual metadata. This paper describes the Parliamentary Archives efforts to explore and test the transfer and authentication archival data from the cloud and into their digital repository.
approaches to preservation from document to data