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.