Richard Lehane

Development of a checklist for assessing business systems for a government recordkeeping regulator, with Recordkeeping Innovation (RKI).

Current state review of archive management and digital preservation systems for a regional heritage centre, with Recordkeeping Innovation (RKI).

In 2025, I re-built Authority Editor for State Records NSW. This is an editing tool to create, manage, and transform retention and diposal authorities in XML. Authority Editor reimplements an original version of the tool (that I also wrote), that has been in use at State Records for the last sixteen years. The new version of Authority Editor is distributed as both a native Windows application and an online tool. Both are free to install and use.

I worked with Recordkeeping Innovation (RKI) on a six-month project to develop an Enterprise Information Architecture for a Commonwealth agency. This has involved a current state assessment, assessing their systems and practices for information management, and designing a future state information architecture that addresses their pain points and uplifts their information governance capacity.

I’m working on a new tool called Siplicity. It is a tool for profiling, analysing, selecting, structuring, describing, and packaging digital files for ingest into a digital repository.

I worked on two projects for clients of elevenM relating to the implementation of disposal for datasets within datalakes like Snowflake and Databricks. Unmanaged retention of data can cause privacy and compliance risks. For these projects I developed principles, metadata requirements, and playbooks for disposal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.