The Public Record Office of Victoria (ProV) has announced it will develop and roll out a centralized digital records archive for the entire Victorian government.
Enterprise content management vendor Documentum won the lion’s share of the tender, with systems integration to be undertaken by archival specialists DMR.
Responsible for the issuance of standards for and the management of public records, ProV is tasked with the identification and retention of records regarded as “archives of state” when they reach the end of their useful administrative life.
Stretching across some 500 agencies the centralized archive will give the Victorian government a secure platform to allow expedient access to digital records by integrating the Documentum platform with the EMC Centera content addressed storage solution.
The deal covers a variety of digital formats ranging from forms, folios, audio, video - and particularly the metadata surrounding media. Security is known to be a major concern for all government archival systems, not least because of the sensitivity of the information held which includes cabinet minutes and ministerial briefings covered by the 30- and 50-year release rules.
As such, ProV’s director of Victorian electronic records strategy Howard Quenault, said the aim of the new system was to provide a solution that would last “for the next 100 years”, adding that public records, by definition must last a lifetime.
Documentum EMC solution will act as the main repository and registry and be integrated by DMR Consulting, who will also provide support, maintenance, disaster recovery and redundancy solutions for the new system.
Documentum managing director for Australia, Graham Pullen, said the new repository offered a “unified approach to managing, archiving and retrieving vast amounts of valuable content".
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