Thomas Sødring

Flexible Record keeping in a FOSS world

Many people do not normally associate their paper documents with records and that they actually are undertaking the process of record keeping when they organize their documents Today online services organize many aspects of our lives and it is likely that people are increasingly letting third parties store and preserve their records without understanding the consequence that their records could easily fall away if the service provider so wishes.

Traditionally paper based documents were organized and preserved within plastic folders, but what are the modern digital equivalents to help us organize and store our records/documents? How do we search within our records? What software does the FOSS community provide for people wishing to organize their digital documents in a world where third parties store everything for us.

Nikita is a FOSS implementation of a Norwegian record keeping and preservation standard called Noark. The project has been developed over a number of years and is worthy of inspection to learn more about record-keeping. There is not really a big difference in public sector record keeping and private record keeping in terms of the required underlying software functionality that is needed.

In this talk we will take a look at some of the principles used in record keeping and how they are applicable to individuals looking for a way to store their documents. Then we will take a look at the technical side of Nikita and describe the principles behind the API and our implementation of the OData standard. We will wrap up with a description about future work and where we see the project going.