Moving Mountains: Tackling the Digital Heap

This presentation describes the journey that HMLR’s Knowledge and Information Management team undertook to tackle their digital heap. The aim was to bring the organisation’s unstructured digital records stored on corporate shared drives into a managed environment.

This presentation demonstrates how the team developed a business-as-usual process to overcome a number of challenges, for example access. Complicated restrictions prevented the team from being able to access records for the purpose of carrying out appraisal.

Another issue faced by the team was the risk of corrupting metadata contained within the records and avoiding metadata, such as date modified, being altered and making the appraisal process more difficult.

This presentation also describes the challenge of developing new processes around the appraisal of digital records, including how to delete multiple records that no longer had business value and how to transfer records of value to a place of permanent preservation.