Victorian Deputy Premier John Thwaites will launch a new “digital archive” service at the Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) today. The archive is claimed to be able to preserve Government electronic records in a format that will be accessible for 100 years.

The Digital Archive project took 2 years and 30 staff to complete at a cost of $6.5 million.

The team built a primary digital repository at PROV, North Melbourne, and a backup repository offsite at Fujitsu, in the eastern suburb of Noble Park.

The digital repository at PROV can store up to 7.7 TB of digital records and currently 1% of the available storage is being used.

Since its launch, 4,000 digital records have been transferred to the Digital Archive and 560 digital records have been downloaded from the Digital Archive new website by visitors. A further 10,000 digital records are in the progress of being transferred to PROV.

The majority of the digital records that have been transferred to PROV are in PDF format; one of the three long-term preservation formats prescribed in the VERS Standard.

The first digital transfers have been from the Departments of Justice and Infrastructure.

All the digital records of the 2006 Commonwealth Games will be transferred to the Digital Archive next year.