TitleThe migration and preservation of six Norwegian municipality record-keeping systems: Lessons learned
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2021
AuthorsSoedring T, Borlund P, Helfert M
JournalJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
Volume72
Pagination699-709
Abstract

Abstract This article 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 article 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.

URLhttps://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/asi.24438
DOI10.1002/asi.24438