Day: November 9, 2010

Pe cand si la noi? Never, never, never, never :(

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New regulations for submission of digital records in Denmark
A new executive order on Submission Information Packages (SIPs) of digital records has been issued by the Danish State Archives. The executive order came into effect on September 1, 2010 and has now been translated to English. It is available on our website at:
http://www.sa.dk/content/us/appraisal_and_transfer
http://www.sa.dk/media(3367,1033)/Executive_Order_on_Submission_Information_Packages.pdf

As one of the few countries in the world, Denmark has a full-scale production of digital records from the public sector. State authorities and agencies must transfer digital records from both business systems and records management systems that are to be preserved at regular intervals (usually every five years) in the form of standardized SIPs. All migration to formats and standards prescribed by the State Archives must be done by the records creators or their vendors before submission to the archives takes place.

The new executive order defines the SIPs that must be submitted. Among the new features of the executive order is the introduction of the SIARD-format, developed by the Swiss National Archives and adopted by the PLANETS-project as the preservation format for databases. Thus, databases are no longer submitted as “flat files” but as XML-files. A few changes to the SIARD-format have been necessary to accommodate the specific needs of the Danish State Archives.  TIFF is still the preferred format for long-term preservation of documents. However, the new regulations also allow for the submission of JPEG-2000-files. GML has been introduced as standard for the submission of data from GIS-systems, and the regulations feature much improved requirements for the documentation and metadata that must be included in every SIP.
The holdings of the National Archives currently comprise about 3,500 AIPs (Archive Information Packages) with a total size of about 20 TB of born digital material, and the amount is steadily increasing.

For further information, please contact Mr. Jan Dalsten Sørensen, Head of Section for Digital Archiving at jds@ra.sa.dk, phone +45 33 92 23 82 or

Mrs. Kirsten Villadsen Kristmar, Head of the Department of Appraisal and Transfer at kvk@ra.sa.dk, phone +45 33 92 23 10.