Tools for Screen Reading

In "How to read a computer screen: the latest tools to ease on-screen reading",  Nick Blackbourn suggests some applications to make web pages and PDF documents easier on the eyes. Some of my techniques for reducing eyestrain:

1. Tune your spam filter for less to read: I pay fastmail.fm to filter my email for me using the SpamAssassin Spam filter, as well as use the filter in the Thunderbird email reader. As a result I have a lot less email to read. As well as cutting out get rich quick schemes, it also filters out a lot of badly written media releases. ;-)
2. PDF to text: When commenting on long PDF documents I copy the text and paste it into a plain text file, then add my comments there. Some documents are unreadable when reduced to text, in which case I don't bother reading them. If it is an important document I will reply to the author explaining why their document is unacceptable.
3. Web Pages with No Style: Some web pages have so much formatting they are hard to read. For these I set "View > Page Style > No style" in my browser and the document is reduced to one column. If the document is still unreadable I don't read it (and might explain to the author why).

ps: Occasionally I will get a badly formatted document which has useful content. So I publish my own simply formatted summary of the document, for the benefit of other readers and as an example to authors. In some cases a web search will direct people to my summary, rather than the original document, because the search engine software (like human readers) can't make sense of the original.

Digital Recordkeeping Transition

Greetings from the Transitioning to Digital Recordkeeping conference in Canberra. I am chairing the opening morning of the conference and then speaking on Records in the Cloud tomorrow morning. The hash tag for the conference is #digitaltrans and I have invited the audience to discuss the topics on-line.

Some issues so far:

1. Common recordkeeping standards where activities span government and non-government sectors, such as education.
2. Common Australian and NZ standards? An example could be Australia adopting the Cloud Computing Code of Practice from Institute of IT Professionals NZ.
3. What perspective are systems built from?
4. Should government RMS be centralized?

The first speaker is John Roberts, Director Client Capability at Archives New Zealand.

e-Tabling Documents for Australian Parliament by 2013

In "e-Tabling Documents for Australian Parliament" (July 28, 2012), I proposed that the Australian Parliament change its procedures to allow the tabling of electronic, rather than paper, documents. Dr Andrew Leigh MP (my local member) has replied to say that a digital repository for the Parliamentary Papers Scheme is in development. It is planned to try it later this year, with full implementation in 2013, if all goes well.

The details are in:

1. "Inquiry into the development of a digital repository and electronic distribution of the Parliamentary Papers Series", Joint Committee on Publications, Australian Parliament, 24 June 2010
2. Presiding Officers' – further response, Joint Committee on Publications, Australian Parliament, June 2012 (PDF 46KB)

... The Parliamentary Papers Series (PPS) is 'a comprehensive collection of information that documents public policy formulation and administration of government since Federation'. 1

It includes all the documents of a substantial nature that have been tabled in either or both the Senate and the House of Representatives, such as parliamentary committee reports but also documents provided by the executive. Although the PPS includes papers prepared by and for the executive, it is administered by the Departments of the Senate and the House of Representatives. ...

Recommendation 1
The committee recommends that an electronic PPS be developed and implemented.

Agreed. The Presiding Officers agree that a basic electronic PPS be developed as soon as practical. In accordance with the business case, an easy to use web interface will follow and two additional stages investigated subsequently. The initial stage will result in access to the tabled documents through the APH website and will be ongoing from the date the series is implemented. The additional stages to be further investigated include digital access to other tabled papers and the back capturing of the documents which form the PPS to date.

Recommendation 2
The committee recommends that the parliamentary departments undertake a business case to examine issues relating to the maintenance of electronic records and long-term archival requirements that would be required in developing an electronic PPS.

The recommendation has been implemented.

Recommendation 3
The committee recommends that the parliamentary departments develop a digital repository for the PPS based in the Parliament.

Agreed. The Presiding Officers note that while the digital repository is to be based in the Parliament, the responsibility for providing the information in a timely manner resides with the author agencies. The Presiding Officers note the AGIMO requirement for departments and agencies to ensure that the on-line versions of documents tabled in Parliament are identical to those that are posted on their websites. This existing requirement provides surety of the content of the documents to be included in the ePPS.

Recommendation 4
The committee recommends that a business case, referred to in recommendation 2, also
include:

• The scope for other tabled documents not in the PPS to be made available through the repository; and
• The costs placed on the parliamentary departments to provide the repository.

The recommendation was implemented in the preparation of the business case.

Recommendation 5
The committee recommends that author departments and agencies be required to provide electronic copies of documents at the same time print copies are provided for tabling in the Parliament.

The Presiding Officers will ensure that electronic copies of documents prepared by either chamber department or the Department of Parliamentary Services, including parliamentary committees, are provided for inclusion in the ePPS.

It is noted that the government response to this recommendation indicates that the electronic documents will not be provided prior to tabling.

Recommendation 6
The committee recommends that a digital repository for the PPS be in production and accessible to users by early 2011, to coincide with the start of the 2011 PPS.

This recommendation could not be met.

Recommendation 7
The committee recommends that the chamber departments administer a digital repository for the PPS.

Agreed. The Presiding Officers support the administration of the digital repository for the ePPS by the Department of the Senate and the Department of the House of Representatives.

The Presiding Officers note that the parliamentary departments have jointly considered the most cost effective means to introduce the new format and that it will use IT services supported by the Department of Parliamentary Services. ...

From: Presiding Officers' – further response, Joint Committee on Publications, Australian Parliament, June 2012 (PDF 46KB)

e-Tabling Documents for Australian Parliament

This is to propose that the Australian Parliament change its procedures to allow the tabling of electronic, rather than paper, documents. This will reduce cost and resource use, as well as improve the readability of the documents.

Currently the Parliament forces a wasteful duplication on agencies, which are required to prepare documents on paper for tabling, along with an electronic version for the public after tabling. Most of the paper copies printed are probably never opened, let alone read. Also, because the Parliament requires the electronic version to closely match the paper edition, the design of the electronic version cannot be optimized for on-line viewing.

I suggest the priority be reversed, with the agencies producing an electronic document, which is also suitable for printing. This will allow the design to be optimized for on-line viewing. The printed document will not look as well laid out as one specifically designed for print, but will be usable.

Converting to electronic tabling would require a few small changes to the wording of procedures. The "Guidelines for the Presentation of Documents to the Parliament" could be changed slightly to remove mention of "printing":

"... Documents should be printed created in accordance with standards prepared by the Joint Publications Committee ..."

The Parliamentary Papers Series (PPS) procedures require 100 copies of documents to be delivered to a location in Canberra for distribution. These complex and expensive procedures could be replaced with a simpler procedure, where one electronic copy of the document is delivered to parliament and distributed via the parliamentary web site.

Paperless Office Nearer Reality

According to the report "The Paper Free Office - dream or reality?" (by Doug Miles, AIIM, February 2012), some progress has been made with reducing paper in the office. The report is available free from AIIM (1.3 Mbyte PDF 28 Pages). The report finds that the consumption of paper and the number of photocopies is decreasing many organizations, but many borne digital documents end up being printed and then scanned back in at some time during their lifetime. The report is useful, but not without flaws, for example the report confuses digital signatures with digitized signatures.

Key Findings

• There is less paper floating around the office – especially in the biggest organizations. The consumption of paper and the number of photocopies is decreasing in 35% of organizations, whereas it is increasing in 32%. In the largest organizations, the net proportion of respondents posting a decrease is 15%.
• Electronic-only filing would halve the storage space needed for paper in 5 years. The average proportion of office space taken up by paper is now 15.3%, and it would drop to 7.4% with an all-electronic filing policy, a saving of nearly 8% in overall office costs.
• On average, 45% of documents that are scanned are 100% “born digital” – just as they came from the printer. And many of the rest would be all-digital if not for the added signatures.
• 77% of invoices that arrive as PDF attachments get printed. 31% of faxed invoices get printed and scanned back in. On average, 30% of invoices arrive as PDF attachments, and 15% as faxes.
• 41% of organizations in the survey are using some form of digital-mailroom, either as a centralized operation or distributed at branch offices. 4% are outsourced.
• 20% of organizations scan half or more of their inbound mail at or before entry. A further 20% are more likely to scan at the point-of-process, and 29% scan-to-archive after the process.
• Improved sharability and searchability is the biggest driver for investment in scanning and capture. Followed by improved productivity and reduced storage space.
• On average, respondents using scanning and capture consider that it improves the speed of response to customers, suppliers, citizens or staff by 6-times or more. 70% estimate an improvement of at least 3-times, and nearly a third (29%) see an improvement of 10-times or more.
• 42% of users have achieved a payback period of 12 months or less from their scanning and capture investments. 57% are posting a payback of 18-months or less.
• A net of 13% of respondents plan to increase their use of bureaus or document process outsource (DPO), particularly in Europe (net 21%). But only a net of 1% will be increasing their offshore activities.
• 38% of respondents have employees equipped to use portable devices to capture documents or forms when not at their desks. Over 14% are using portable scanners for forms and supporting documents. 6% are using smartphones or tablets, including 4% who use OCR to capture data at the device.
• Over half of those using portable devices capture signatures, either by scanning (30%), stylus (11%) or using a digital signature app (21%).
• Speed of data availability and keeping paper out of the process are given as the biggest advantages of mobile capture, followed by better data accuracy and fewer lost or incomplete forms.
• 12% of respondents are committed to a strategy of cloud deployment of capture – rising to 20% of the largest organizations. 18% overall have firmly decided against it and 39% are waiting for a company decision on cloud in general (27%), or capture specifically (12%).
• Spending predictions indicate a considerable increase in spend on capture software, including mobile capture and as a front-end to SharePoint. A net of 23% of responding organizations indicate increased spend for the next 12 months. Spend on scanners is set to be stable, while spend on outsourcing is set to decrease. ...
  

From: The Paper Free Office - dream or reality?, Doug Miles, AIIM, February 2012

Finding Meaning in Electronic Documents

Greetings from the Sixteenth Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS 2011) at the Australian National University in Canberra. This is being held in conjunction with the 2011 Australasian Language Technology Workshop (ALTA). ADCS is about how to construct, store, manage, use and find electronic documents. But it is also about how to extract meaning from e-documents. That may sound very academic, but this is worth billions of dollars for social media companies (the event is sponsored by Google and NICTA). ADCS is free and there are some spare seats, so if you happen to be in Canberra, and have an interest in the field, come along.

ps: A question I have is why are academic papers eight pages long? Is this due to the mechanics of paper based printing and so no longer relevant, or is eight pages a good size for people to read?

Conference Schedule

8:40	Registration
9:00	Welcome
9:10	Session 1: ADCS/ALTA Joint Session (Chair: David Martinez)
	Li Wang, Diana Mccarthy and Timothy Baldwin. Predicting Thread Linking Structure by Lexical Chaining Diego Molla and Maria Elena Santiago-Martinez. Development of a Corpus for Evidence Based Medicine Summarisation Mike Symonds, Peter Bruza, Laurianne Sitbon and Ian Turner. Tensor Query Expansion: A cognitively motivated relevance model Yan Shen, Yuefeng Li, Yue Xu, Renato Lannella, Abdulmohsen Algarni and Xiaohui Tao. An Ontology-based Mining Approach for User Search Intent Discovery
10:40	Morning Tea
11:10	Session 2 (Chair: Sally Jo Cunningham)
	David Alexander, Andrew Trotman and Alistair Knott. Click Log Based Evaluation of Link Discovery Xiang-Fei Jia, Andrew Trotman and Jason Holdsworth. Fast Search Engine Vocabulary Lookup (*) Amir Hadad, Alexander Krumpholz, Nina Studeny, Tom Gedeon and David Hawking. Automatic identification of the most important elements in an XML collection
12:00	Industry Keynote: Simon Kravis, Fujitsu Australia (Chair: Paul Thomas)
	Information Retrieval in Large Organisations. Information retrieval within large organisations is usually from repositories with little or no hyperlinking of documents. Tools which are successful for public-facing web sites are frequently unsuccessful inside organisations through poor ranking of search results, high levels of duplication and near-duplication and the frequent occurrence of documents which are not completely described by the text which they contain. Metadata-based retrieval is limited by poor coverage from manually assigned metadata and the limited availability of automated metadata assignment.
12:45	Lunch
14:00	Session 3 (Chair: Falk Scholer)
	Shane Culpepper, Michiko Yasukawa and Falk Scholer. Language Independent Ranked Retrieval with NeWT David Bainbridge and Sally Jo Cunningham. A Workflow for Document Level Interoperability Iman Amini, Alexandra Uidtenbogerd and Mark Sanderson. The Interplay of Information Retrieval and Query by Singing With Words (*) Timothy Jones, Paul Thomas, David Hawking and Ramesh Sankaranarayana. The usefulness of web spam (*) Su Nam Kim, Timothy Baldwin and Lawrence Cavedon. Harvesting Domain-Specific Terms using Wikipedia
15:20	Afternoon Tea
15:50	Session 4 (Chair: Andrew Turpin)
	Nicholas Sherlock and Andrew Trotman. Efficient sorting of search results by string attributes Laurence Park. Examining document model residuals to provide feedback during Information Retrieval evaluation Guido Zuccon, Anthony Nguyen, Teerapong Leelanupab and Leif Azzopardi. Indexing without Spam (*) Darren Wei-Che Huang, Shlomo Geva, Andrew Trotman and Kelly Y. Itakura. Mobile Applications of Focused Link Discovery (*) Kelly Itakura and Shlomo Geva. Six Degrees of Cohesion in Patent Citation Network
17:20	ADCS Business Meeting

Even Genius Needs to Do Paperwork

The exhibition "Handwritten: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Treasures from Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin" at the the National Library of Australia shows a great range of work over the centuries. Some of the manuscripts shown are of great works, such as a draft of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, but others show that great people had to deal with paperwork, such as receipt from Michelangelo acknowledging funds from a patron. Others show that even geniuses don't always get it right, with Heisenberg's draft of a universal equation for everything which did not work out.

The exhibition's music room was of most interest, with a cacophony of the different music displayed being played in the background. There is an iPad on a wall with headphones, where you can pick from the works. The exhibition organisers need to install a set of white headphones on a white hook, as the room so dim (to preserve the manuscripts) and so the headphones and where to hand them up is almost invisible.

Other works to get my attention were Schliemann writing about the discovery of Troy, a patent by Watt (of steam engine fame), Diesel asking for state funding for his engine and several authors complaining about reviews they got.

It is unfortunate there is not a web site to accompany the exhibition, given the work which has gone into its preparation. Such a web site could be produced with a few days work, using the materials already prepared for the exhibition. This is something the ACT Government might consider funding to boost tourist numbers.

The exhibition is open until 18 March 2012 and is free, but it is a good idea to book a free ticket online (the NLA is using an Apple iPad to check the bookings at a desk in the foyer). There are also various events associated with the exhibition.

Manuscripts from Berlin State Library in Canberra

Greetings from the National Library of Australia, where Professor Everardus Overgaauw, head of the Manuscript Department of the Berlin State Library is talking about the manuscripts on display in Canberra in the exhibition: "Handwritten: Ten Centuries of Manuscript Treasures from Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin". The Berlin State Library was founded in 1661 and the story of the library and its manuscripts is bound up with that of the German state, with formation, war, partition and reunification.

On display are handwritten documents by: Bach, Beethoven, Cook, Curie, Dante, Darwin, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Einstein, Galileo, Goethe, Haydn, Kafka, Kant, Kepler, Machiavelli, Marx, Michelangelo, Napoleon, Newton, Nietzsche, Nightingale, Nobel, Pasteur and Watt.

The exhibition is open until 18 March 2012 and is free, but it is a good idea to book a free ticket online (the NLA is using an Apple iPad to check the bookings at a desk in the foyer). There are also various events associated with the exhibition.

Document Computing Symposium

The Sixteenth Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS 2011) will be held at the Australian National Unviersity in Canberra on Friday 2 December 2011 and is free, but you need to register.

ADCS 2011 is an opportunity for researchers and practitioners in document management and information retrieval to meet and present their work. The symposium aims to cover all aspects of Document Computing - issues ranging from the fundamentals of document architectures and standards for markup, through storage, management, retrieval, authentication and workflow, to active and virtual documents. The symposium emphasises both commercial and academic issues by encouraging a variety of submissions.

Topics of interest

• Cognitive Aspects of Documents
• Digital Libraries
• Document Databases
• Document Management
• Document Standards (XML, SGML etc)
• Document Workflow
• Information Retrieval
• Multimedia Document Management
• Multimedia Resource Discovery
• Natural Language Techniques and Documents
• Personalised Documents
• User Studies Involving Documents
• Web Documents

Documentary in HTML5

The documentary One Millionth Tower was made using animation in HTML5, as described in "Here’s How You Make a Documentary Only Using HTML5 and WebGL Graphics" (By Adrian Covert, GIZMODO, Nov 6, 2011 11:30 AM). Like many documentaries, this one relies on panning and zooming over still images. In theory, using HTML5 should make this more efficient as a still image can be downloaded, along with the instructions for how to pan and zoom it. But in this case the documentary is 163 Mbytes for 6.5 minutes, making it 25 Mbytes per minute, which is not small.

Electronic Records Management at National Archives

National Archives of Australia (NAA) held a Government Agencies Information Network (GAIN) Forum in Canberra this morning. Barbara Berce from NAA began by introducing the GAIN initiative of NAA to communicate to agency staff. As well as face to face presentations, an online forum will be available in the next few weeks.

Barbara then reprised her presentation "From Red Tape and Reticence to Realisation" (from RMAA inForum 2010). She argued there are efficiency benefits from digital work practices and to "... stop living in the paper world".

NAA recently conducted a survey of government agencies. One question was if agencies had a comprehensive digital records management environment, with 30% saying yes, while 40% of the remainder having no plans to do so. Almost half of agencies have primarily paper records. Reasons for this included the difficulty of getting staff to use electronic records. A summary of the survey will be on the new GAIN web site.

Agencies are estimated to have 1,300 shelf kilometres of paper records. Much of this is outdated short term records and copies of records already stored electronically and so could be eliminated. Similar results have been found in the USA (testimony to congress by US government archivist) and New Zealand (archivists annual report).

One driver for change will be new FOI legislation. Agencies which cannot respond to FOIs quickly will have increased costs. Barbara pointed out the community now expects online and interactive access to government. This new information now needs to be retained.

The aim is that capture and disposal of records is automated. This was in "Note for file: A report on recordkeeping in the Australian Public Service" (Management Advisory Committee 8, from 2007). But apart from appropriate software (which is improving) this also requires organisational commitment. One point I disagree with the presentation on is cost. I suggest that better integrated records management could greatly reduce IT costs in agencies, rather than increasing it. As an example, eliminating the use of general purpose "office" software, particularly Microsoft Word, for the creation of documents would greatly reduce costs and also result in better records retention. Using web based software could eliminate most Ms-Word documents. Apart from the saving in licence costs (only about 10% of agency staff would need an actual copy of Ms-Office), this would would reduce storage requirements by 90% with much more efficient document formats used and and processor requirements by about 75%.

Barbara emphasised the cultural change needed. She suggested making the most of what equipment the agency has and considering records management requirements when new systems are acquired. But I suggest a culture change is needed at NAA, from thinking of themselves as being the ultimate repository of old records after they are no longer of use by agencies, to an active participant.

An example of how NAA could take a more active role would be to sponsor an online "cloud" system for smaller agencies. In conjunction with AGIMO a commercial provider would offer a complete system. All data in the system would be held in Australian Government approved facilities, under the control of Australian nationals on Australian territory. A small agency would then just need a credit card to pay for an account on the system, a web browser for each employee using it and a secure link to the cloud system. The agency would not need to purchase any records management or other software, nor run any servers of its own. Such a system could come complete with free open source software for running the basic operations of a government agency, including records management, word processing spreadsheets and email. NAA would then have a showcase for good electronic record practice, as well as an easy solution to the problem of supporting the archive needs of many small, and sometimes short lived, agencies with orphan record formats.

RMAA Canberra Meeting

The NAA meeting was followed by a meeting of the Records Management Association of Australasia (RMAA) Canberra branch Lunch Bag Education Update Seminar. I was invited to stay for the meeting and talk a little about the course COMP7420 "Electronic Data Management" I am designing for ANU.

This was an impromptu talk so I put the course web page up on screen and made these points:

1. I am not a records management professional, but an IT person who chaired a committee on electronic document management when a public servant. I designed a short intensive course run at ANU (one of my former students was at the RMAA session) and have been teaching records management and metadata to IT and business students.
2. ANU is the new kid on the block in terms of RM courses. It is not offering a full program at this point, just a couple of subjects (the other is COMP7410: Data Mining and Matching by Dr Peter Christen). These subjects are six weeks (half a standard university unit). The student needs to spend the equivalent of a least one hour a day studying.
3. Courses can be done one off, or contribute to a certificate, diploma or masers, with courses from across the campus as part of the ANU Graduate Studies Select program.
4. These courses are based in the Engineering and Computer Science with close ties to the cutting edge of new digital systems. As an example, David Hawking who developed the Funnelkack web search engine used by the Australian Government is an adjunct in the next office. We don't need electronic communications as we can shout through the wall. ;-)
5. Courses are using advanced e-learning techniques and the most advanced Australian developed software (Moodle).
6. Assignments will be work based: "wrote a report for your executive on the current practices in your organisation ... make recommendations for improving practices in your organisation.

Apart from being able to promote my coruse to potential students, the RMAA event was very useful as it presented details of the University of Canberra, CIT and other records management and information management courses. One point this made was that RM courses are spread across different disciplines at different universities and even in the one university.
One interesting point was that the NAA also runs courses, which while aimed at the pubic service, are available to the private sector. NAA also has teaching materials and e-learning modules.There was a discussion of professionalism which was similar to the discussions I have had at the ACS. A problem is that records managers are seen as people who push bits of paper around in the basement, rather than their role as information managers.
ps: NAA e-meeting room: Archives have equipped their meeting room with a hi-tech interactive lectern. The computer functions provided are very good, but like many such installations, the ergonomics could be better. The pen operated display screen has been mounted in the centre of a standard sloped lectern surface. There is a cordless mouse and compact keyboard provided. It would be better if the lectern was replaced with a more horozontal surface, with the screen towards the back. This would provide more space for the keyboard and more room for the mouse. The screen could be placed on a shelf with room for the keybaord to be pushed out of the way underneath. A larger, easier to operate keyboard could then be used. But that is a minor quibble and the equipment worked very well.

NSW unable to archive digital information

The NSW Auditor-General has reported to Parliament that the State Records Authority of New South Wales is in breach of its enabling legislation as it is "...unable to archive digital records despite growing reliance on the use of digital records by New South Wales Government agencies". The AG has recommended a government digital archiving solution be established. The AG also notes that the archive will run out of storage space during this financial year (e-records would reduce the space problem).

Help is at hand. The NSW State Records Authority provides a list of courses available on records management. First in the list is my own "Electronic Data Management" COMP7420, being offered at the Australian National University from January 2010. As I am still designing the course, I could include the requirements for the NSW e-Archive as a case study. Several students on my Green ICT course wrote official carbon reduction strategies for their agencies as their assignments. NSW government staff could write the e-archive strategy as their assignment for this course.

It should be noted that there is considerable guidance for implementing an e-arching system in NSW:

1. M2009-11 Premier's Memoranda: NSW Standard on Digital Recordkeeping
2. Standard on digital recordkeeping and Short guide to implementing the Standard
3. M2004-14 Use and Retention of Email for Government Communications
4. Policy on digital records preservation
5. Policy on electronic recordkeeping
6. ICT Attitudes to records and recordkeeping: survey report
7. Considering digital recordkeeping as part of systems development or procurement (RIB52)
8. Strategies for documenting Government business: The 'DIRKS' manual
9. Introducing recordkeeping metadata (RIB 18)
10. Selecting records management software (RIB 2)
11. Checklist for assessing business systems (RIB 42)
12. Managing digital records
13. Desktop Management: Managing electronic documents and directories (RIB 30)
14. Destroying digital records: When pressing delete is not enough (RIB 51)
15. Digital imaging and recordkeeping (RIB 11)
16. Email and other templates for creating digital records
17. FAQs - Emails and recordkeeping (RIB 49)
18. General Retention and Disposal Authority - Source Records That Have Been Migrated (GA 33)
19. Guidelines on keeping web records
20. Keeping recruitment records using e-Recruitment (RIB 56)
    
21. Managing the message: Guidelines on managing formal and informal communications as records
22. Records management and web 2.0
23. Archives Advice: Protecting and handling magnetic media (NAA)
24. Archives Advice: Protecting and handling optical disks (NAA)
25. Digital records preservation in the NSW public sector: A discussion paper
26. Australasian Digital Recordkeeping Initiative (ADRI) website
27. Digital Records Advisory Group

Ministerial Memorandum 2009-11 ‘Standard on Digital Recordkeeping’ acknowledged the increasing reliance upon digital records by New South Wales public sector agencies. The Memorandum also noted the benefits of a standardised approach to digital record keeping.

The Authority’s ‘Future Proof’ strategy aims to help government agencies manage digital records. A key aspect of the strategy is to implement a digital archiving facility for New South Wales government. Currently, the Authority declines digital records that an agency wishes to transfer for archiving because it does not have the infrastructure to access the information in the record.

The Crown Solicitor has advised that if the Authority holds public records that are not accessible, the Authority is in breach of its enabling legislation. Notwithstanding its current policy of declining records, the Authority holds some inaccessible records and is in breach.

Google WebP Not the Solution to Image Size

Google have made available WebP, as a replacement for the JPEG image format. Google claim that WebP, which uses algorithms from the VP8 video format , better looking images that can help make the web faster.This format does have the advantage of being free from patent issue, but I don;t think the increased efficiency makes it worth changing to. According to "Google Promotes Replacement for JPEG Image Format" (Mark Hachman, PC Magazine, 09.30.2010), the new format is on average 39% more efficient than JPEG. From my observation of JPEG images in web pages the problem is not efficiency of compression but the wrong images at the wrong resolution being used. Typically images are scanned at a far higher resolution than needed, making the files tens or hundreds of times larger than needed. Monochrome images are stored in colour format and line drawings, which should be in GIF or PNG, are stored instead in JPEG.

If Google wants to speed up the web, then a tool which helps people scan images in the correct format would be useful. Also they could provide web-masters with a tool which reports images on their web sites in the wrong format and duplicated copies of images (the Australian Government stores millions of copies of the Commonwealth Arms, for example). It would also help, particularly with mobile clients, to stop the download of progressive format images when sufficient detail had been provided.