International Council of Archives

G’day mate!

My name is Kate Cumming and I work in the Digital Recordkeeping team at State Records New South Wales.

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I started my career more than 15 years ago now at the National Archives in Canberra. I had a wonderful time there, working firstly as a reference archivist and then in arrangement and description. Having done a degree in Australian history, I absolutely loved being paid to play with Australian history all day long.
In these reference and A&D roles I was required to learn all about Peter Scott’s series system. Knowledge of the workings of this brilliant descriptive system have stood me in good stead throughout my archival career and are directly relevant to the work I am doing today on contemporary digital recordkeeping.
After National Archives I came to work at State Records NSW, based in Sydney. Here I have always worked in the Government Recordkeeping team, firstly on guidance and training initiatives and now on digital recordkeeping projects.
I love my job and the fantastic people I work with. In the Digital Recordkeeping team our role is to work with current government bodies, to ensure that government has good digital information today and to safeguard the digital archives of the future.
It is a challenging but fascinating role. There are only three of us in the Digital Recordkeeping team so we are always busy and are involved in many diverse projects. For example, on any one day we could be responding to enquiries about managing records in databases, meeting with an agency wanting to deploy a cloud computing strategy, developing guidelines on digitisation and writing blog posts on metadata and social media.
Scrolling through our Future Proof blog will give you a good idea of the range of issues we are grappling with – see http://futureproof.records.nsw.gov.au/ You can also follow us on Twitter - @FutureProofNSW

Sydney Records Centre, State Records New South Wales

The extraordinary pace of technical change and its ongoing impact on government business means that we learn new things every day in this job. There are significant threats to sustainable digital archives in all archival environments but in NSW we are working hard to mitigate these. We are making some headway and have many brilliant records managers in NSW who are working to create the best digital recordkeeping environments they can. We also work closely with Richard Lehane (who posted a news update a few weeks ago) and the other excellent members of State Records’ Digital Archives team, on strategies we can implement now to ensure NSW will have a strong digital heritage in the future.
I am really looking forward to the Congress in August. It will be the first ICA Congress I have been to, and a fantastic opportunity to meet with colleagues from across the world. Travel safe and I will see you there!

Kate Cumming.