Digital continuity at the Welsh Assembly Government: de-duplicating and classifying an unstructured email vault and shared drives

In 2010/11 the Welsh Government’s Information and Records Management engaged in a Digital Continuity Project. We engaged a research team from the University of Wales Newport (UWN) to conduct a Proof of Concept project. Guidance Software Inc has provided the eDiscovery software used by the research team.

The aim of the project was to find out what “unstructured information” and records the Welsh Assembly held, where they were and to identify steps which could be put into place to ensure the digital continuity of unstructured information needed to do business and to dispose of information no longer needed.

In our presentation today, Stilianos and I will be telling how the project mined, categorised and classified (based on a pan-governmental vocabulary) a sample data set information) from a heterogeneous large scale computer infrastructure and store/fuse the search results in a forensically sound manner while destroying the duplicates and without disrupting daily staff operations.