Our first duty under the Public Records Act is to “take all practicable steps for the preservation of records” in our care, to secure them for future generations. This includes the physical care of our ever-growing collection of analogue records, and also includes the selection, transfer and preservation of a digital public record that is growing exponentially year-on-year, and which exists in a world where trust in the veracity of information is more valuable than ever, because it is under threat. We must become a ‘living digital national archive’ by instinct and design.
This research theme captures our challenges in appraisal, selection and sensitivity review, as we expand our archival practice to include new collections and real-time published court judgements, in becoming the ‘archive not just of government but of the state’; the use of technology, including AI, to help make decisions about what should be transferred to the archive; and the need to preserve physical and digital records, including AI models, independently of the software that was used to create them.
This must happen within a clear policy and legal framework, where the imperative to govern openly and the rights of individuals to control their own data sometimes exist in tension.
Get in touch with research@nationalarchives.gov.uk
This question was published as part of the set of ARIs in this document:
No topics assigned yet
No research fields assigned yet
More and more government data are created in digital form. Emails have replaced letters, PDFs and Word documents have replaced paper memos, and audio/visual files are stored in governmental internal archives and in vario...
Funded by: AHRC
The LUSTRE project aims to unlock government archival records in digital form using AI, addressing the challenges mentioned in the question.
The AURA network brings together Digital Humanists, Computer Scientists, archivists and other stakeholders to unlock cultural assets held in "dark" digital archives currently closed to users. Not so long ago, h...
Funded by: FIC
The AURA project focuses on unlocking cultural assets in 'dark' digital archives using AI and bringing together relevant stakeholders, aligning with the question's theme.
This Network will link academics in the discipline of archives and records management, other researchers who use archives and records and the professionals who manage records. It will collect and disseminate information ...
Funded by: AHRC
Partially relevant as it focuses on research network in archives and records management, but does not directly address rethinking the role of a researching archive in creating encounters between institutions and disciplines.