Cyber café
Seamless flow
The National Archives' groundbreaking Seamless Flow Programme has been successfully completed. Now that the Seamless Flow system is operational, the transfer from programme to business as usual for electronic records at The National Archives has begun.
Over the next few years, The National Archives will gradually move from an institution whose main medium of operation is paper-based to one which mainly deals in electronic records. The Seamless Flow Programme ensured these records are stored, preserved and made available through Electronic Records Online on our website.
Most government records are now created electronically as a result of the widespread introduction of electronic records management systems. Previous legislation meant that the bulk of records were not transferred until they were 30 years old. However, with the introduction of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI), 'closed until 30' disappeared in January 2005. We now needed to make arrangements to select and preserve such records as soon as possible after their creation since, unlike paper, they are highly vulnerable to corruption and loss.
Electronic records created in government departments were selected and transferred to The National Archives where they were stored in our digital archive. The process was quite labour intensive. However, no preservation (as opposed to storage) activities needed to be undertaken, since the records were relatively young.
Over the next few years, we expect that the volume of electronic records transferred to The National Archives will increase dramatically. The only way we can manage this is by automating as many of the processes as possible and ensuring that others (selection, exemption identification, redaction) take place when the records are created in the government departments, or as soon as possible after creation. We will also need the capacity to handle an increased range of document types: video, databases, animations etc. We must have the ability to actively preserve the records, for example to migrate electronic records to new formats as they become obsolete. In addition, we will need to handle the early access changes brought about by the FOI Act, including delivery of electronic records to users over the internet.
We would not have been able to absorb the increased volume of electronic records by scaling up our previous semi-manual processes. Only a re-engineering of the workflows and a major investment in automation of the processes, as envisaged by the Seamless Flow Programme, provided a solution.
These pages have charted the progress of the individual projects that made up the Seamless Flow Programme. This final update confirms the successful closure of the programme.
