Seventeen years professional experience in records, information and archives. Specialist in digital archives and electronic recordkeeping.
Based in Sydney, Australia.
Available to help with
- Digital preservation workflows
- Digital preservation systems
- Archives management systems
- System implementation and integration
- Business case drafting
- Recordkeeping policies, procedures, instruments
- Digital recordkeeping
- Digital transformation
- Digitisation projects
- Information governance
Contact
Australian Business Number
Recent projects
Digital asset survey
Digital asset survey for a NSW government agency. Analysed the outputs of a series of outsourced, audio-visual digitisation projects to make recommendations for the control and digital preservation of the assets. The main challenge was to integrate a diverse set of metadata (file system metadata, manifests provided to/ received from the digitisation supplier, catalogue exports) to build an consolidated, inter-linked, and authoritative view of the digitial assets.
WASM build of Siegfried
Archives NZ sponsored the development of a WASM build for Siegfried, the file format identification tool that I created. This means that Siegfried can be run in a web browser, client-side, and without the need for end-users to install the tool. For more details, see this LinkedIn post.
Artificial Intelligence Governance Toolkit
In collaboration with Recordkeeping Innovation (RKI), I developed an Artificial Intelligence Governance Toolkit. This comprises an AI Governance Maturity Model, risk rating tool, AI systems register, information managers’ checklist and a model corporate AI policy. More information about RKI’s AI governance services is available here.
Skills and experience
Digitisation
During my career, I have worked on all sides of digitisation projects. I’ve advised government agencies on requirements and best practices for the digitisation of official records. As manager of an archives team, I have supervised in-house digitisation projects, setting specifications for the digitisation of paper and photographic material and defining metadata capture and quality assurance processes. Most recently, I’ve worked on a project to wrangle the outputs of outsourced AV digitisation projects, devising strategies for the preservation and control of digital assets.
File format analysis
I am an expert in identifying and working with legacy file formats. I wrote Siegfried, a file format identification tool, based on the National Archives’ PRONOM registry, that is bundled with leading digital preservation systems such as Archivematica
I can analyze, reverse engineer, and develop custom migration strategies for file formats. In past roles I’ve tackled obscure formats such as Wang Archive Diskette, Status database, and TRIM VMBX.
Automating disposal
I’ve done pioneering work on the automatic application of retention and disposal rules. I wrote State Records NSW’s XML schema for retention and disposal authorities and created an accompanying desktop drafting application, Authority Editor.
More recently, as manager of the Digital Archives team at State Records NSW, I supervised pilot projects that used machine learning to automatically apply retention rules to a corpus of official records.