Working with people in different timezones (and being located in the latest of the timezones), means that in the mornings I’ve usually got a stack of messages from people I’m working with and today is no exception. I’ll often ping someone in an east coast time zone when I finish up for the day, and they are then able to run with things before I’ve had my morning coffee in Western Australia. The project I’m working on currently also includes partner organisations around the world, so frequently mornings are the best time for meeting with all of those. 

Today started with celebrations for Piers’ birthday – coffee and cakes and silly hats with the whole gang from our offices around Australia. We were already pretty good at working remotely with clients and our colleagues in other states, but the pandemic has really sharpened our skills at this. For the celebration, in the Perth office we had everyone on a big screen so that we could stop by for a chat, and also allow all of us to join in a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday!

After the celebrations, it was back to work, starting with a meeting with some of our devops team and another of our business analysts in Tasmania to brainstorm the architecture for a complex application and storage system that will be hosted in AWS. As with all meetings, this then resulted in each of us going away to do our part of the work and documentation, ready for presentation to the client. For me, this means checking through the processes we have designed and superimposing them over the AWS infrastructure design to make sure that the system architecture is complete for the workflows.

We’re also working with some new open source software in my current project, so I’ve been looking at how it functions to gain expertise myself, and also to determine how it will change the way data flows through the system. We’ve been lucky to partner with the original developers of this software, so we’re getting great advice on it, as well as the opportunity to feed back how we’re using it with our clients. 

Commuting home at lunchtime is a great way to clear my head to spend the afternoon tackling tasks that need focussed time. Gaia’s flexible working is really helpful to me in that regard as I find it much easier to do focussed work at home than the office – I’m fortunate to have a quiet home office! Before that though, I am able to quickly troubleshoot a problem another client is having with their system for our support team, allowing the client to get back to work within 10 minutes of logging the issue. 

While I specialise in archives and collections projects, there are several different systems that we support and develop for in that area, as well as many different clients in almost every state in Australia. Tomorrow is an early start to lead a workshop on the east coast and then start working on the outcomes from that. Every day is truly a one-off. 

We’ve got a lot of big projects in progress and coming up, so if you can see yourself working for Gaia Resources, then feel free to get in touch with our recruitment team, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Meg

The post Once in a lifetime – a day in the life of a business analyst at Gaia Resources appeared first on Gaia Resources.

So what is digital preservation? It’s about making sure that information that is kept in digital form can still be read in the future – changing software file formats and media storage being two of the more common issues that this area addresses, but backup file formats are a special subset of software formats that are often overlooked. It also ensures that the information maintains its provenance and evidentiary value, a key issue for much business information. 

Back in the 1990s, I worked in the helpdesk at a large university, and when Microsoft released Word version 6 for Macintosh, we suddenly had a big problem because most of the documents staff and students had created in the previous versions of Word, no longer opened in the new one. Several weeks of manual conversion of these documents were done by the helpdesk staff, and we had a fairly good success rate… however, this became my first lesson in the fragility of software formats and how information can be lost. 

In the same workplace, I also experienced the fragility of hardware for storing data, when “legacy-free PCs” started being sold that didn’t include floppy disc drives – starting with the iMac in 1999 – and suddenly again all of the staff and students needed assistance in moving their files from floppy discs to CDs or network-based storage. 

Many years later, I was fortunate to work at the State Records Office of Western Australia, and there I discovered just how big an issue these things were. One of my first experiences with Gaia Resources was bringing some floppy discs around to their office where they had a machine that had both 3 ½ and 5 ¼ inch floppy disc drives as well as a USB port to retrieve some digital information. 

Floppy discs in sizes 8”, 5 ¼”, and 3 ½”

Though still ostensibly a “collecting” organisation, the information that is held by the State Records Office of Western Australia is that which has been created across the Western Australian government since its establishment in 1828 as the Colonial Secretary’s Office. That includes information transferred from government agencies such as Landgate and the Department of Education, as well as local councils like the City of Joondalup, and of course the elected members of parliament such as former Western Australian premier, Colin Barnett – even company investigations into the Bond Corporation.  Much of this information began its life in digital form, and arguably now, most if not all information created by government, individuals, and commercial organisations is created digitally. So does that information cease to have value when CD drives to read discs are no longer easily available, or you no longer have WordPerfect installed on your latest laptop? 

The area of Digital Preservation specifically looks at these issues, to ensure that information can still be accessed into the future. We’ve worked with a number of different archive clients including Queensland State Archive, Public Records Office of Victoria, State Records Office of Western Australia, and Libraries Tasmania, and continue to work with these and others to introduce and expand their digital preservation activities. Whilst it’s primarily the collecting organisations that are taking these steps, it’s definitely something that all businesses should consider in planning their futures, and what their information is worth in their ongoing success. 

If you think your business information is worth looking after for the long term and would like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help you with digital preservation, then feel free to get in touch with me directly, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Meg

The post Digital Preservation for the Masses appeared first on Gaia Resources.

PROV elected to use the open source software CollectiveAccess for their archival management system, and engaged us to customise it to support their new archival model, as well as integrate with other new systems they were implementing as part of this project. This included us integrating with a Persistent IDentifier (PID) minting system which assigns a persistent and unique ID to every record in PROV’s collection, and also integrating the AMS with their new warehouse management system, which manages the location of their physical records. 

This project has been an iterative process, with our team working collaboratively with PROV staff to refine and develop the functionality and integrations of the AMS as the other systems came online. We worked with vendors from around the world (leading to some unusual meeting times!) so that we could work through any issues with integrations in real time.

PROV’s new archives management system gives the public access to digital material as well as a host of integrations for staff

The last 18 months of the project were done while the world wrestled with the COVID-19 pandemic, and poor Melbourne spent a great deal of that time in lockdown – providing an unexpected opportunity for PROV to take extra time for testing before go-live. 

It was terrific to have PROV’s team so involved in this project. They had done an enormous amount of work prior to the project starting so they were very clear on how their metadata would fit into the new system, and how their business processes would work with so many new systems. 

If you would like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help you with your collection management system design and implementation, then feel free to get in touch with me directly, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Meg

The post PROV are Archive and kicking appeared first on Gaia Resources.