The migration and preservation of six Norwegian municipality record-keeping systems: Lessons learned

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.