On 15 and 16 August, Dr de Vries visited the Utrechts Archives and National Archives in The Netherlands.

The municipality of Utrecht and the Utrecht Archives are collaborating on the project e-depot (electronic deposit).  They are researching the differences between metadata schemas of the Province of Utrecht’s systems and the metadata schema used in the e-depot, developing pratical workflows for ingest of content and creating a realistic picture of the effort that is required in the implementation of the e-depot. Mr Kaj van Vliet, head of Inspection and Archives and project leader of the pilot e-depot project,  discussed the challenges to meet the 2017 deadline when all correspondence and documentation in Utrecht will be born-digital.

Ms Mette van Essen, at the National Archives in The Hague, is researching E-Discovery for Information Management within the Dutch Government. She is grappling with the change from the analog, linear view of record keeping to an interconnected, networked way that reflects the current information reality. A particularly complex problem is government email. For example, how do you separate private from organizational correspondence, how do you archive email threads and groups so that they can be archived in an accessible format?