The migration and preservation of six Norwegian municipality record‐keeping systems: Lessons learned
Journal article, Peer reviewed
Accepted version
Date
2021-12-23Metadata
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Original version
Sødring, Borlund, Helfert. The migration and preservation of six Norwegian municipality record‐keeping systems: Lessons learned. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24438Abstract
This paper presents a rare insight into the migration of municipality record-keeping databases. The migration of a database for preservation purposes poses several challenges. In particular, our findings show that relevant issues are file-format heterogeneity, collection volume, time and database structure evolution, and deviation from the governing standard. This paper presents and discusses how such issues interfere with an organization's ability to undertake a migration, for preservation purposes, of records from a relational database. The case-study at hand concerns six Norwegian municipality record-keeping databases covering a period from 1999 to 2012. The findings are presented with a discussion on how these issues manifest themselves as a problem for long term preservation. The results discussed here may help an organization and Information Systems (IS) manager to establish a best practice when undertaking a migration project and enable them to avoid some of the pitfalls that were discovered during this project.