Providing administrative access to large numbers of archived databases
Nikolaj Wolthers Andersen
With this poster, we hope to open a discussion about the challenges involved with providing access to preserved databases at scale, based on our own experiences through the past decade. We will highlight those access related tasks which tend to be the most resource intensive and which can be considered bottlenecks in the process of scaling up, and we will share lessons learned, both good and bad.
We represent NEA (Netværket Elektronisk Arkivering – Network for Electronic Archiving), which is a network consisting of 31 Danish municipal archives, in which resources are pooled to build an organization capable of handling the challenges of digital archiving. Throughout the past 15 years or so, NEA has assisted our member archives in preserving more than 2000 databases, of which more than 1000 have been made available for use, using our in-house developed tool, called MiNEA.
Danish municipal archives are tasked with preserving municipal public records, which in Denmark for the past 15-20 years have been almost exclusively digital. The main reason for preserving all these records is to preserve historical documentation about the Danish public administration for future generations, but also to serve the public as well as the municipal administrations that created the records in the first place. As even the oldest born-digital records are still very young, historical interest is low, and so the vast majority of inquires come from the public and from the municipal authorities who originally created the data. These inquiries usually match the types of inquiries made of the original IT systems, in which the records were created. For instance, finding all case records related to a specific personal ID number, all records related to a specific plot of land, etc.
We expect to showcase our tool alongside the poster, showing of the main features and allowing visitors to try it out for themselves.
managing access scaling up