Cloud Alpha for Transfer of Digital Records

Description

The National Archives has developed a new service for the transfer of born-digital records to TNA. Transfer Digital Records (TDR), released in public beta in April 2023, helps UK Government departments (and other 'Public Record Bodies') upload, prepare and transfer digital public records to TNA for permanent preservation (and if applicable access), through a web browser, and within an AWS environment. This helps departments transfer records quickly and easily, helping them comply with the Public Records Act.

TDR accepts upload of records from a network drive environment. An increasing number of users are now using cloud ecosystems, mostly SharePoint Online. The National Archives wishes to develop a service that enables transfer of digital records from these environments into TDR.  

Records cannot yet be sent directly from M365 SharePoint to TDR, so transfer from SharePoint currently requires transferring bodies to download/export their records from SharePoint to a network drive environment in order to follow the standard upload process. This can result in loss of metadata which damages record integrity. We wish to create a new method that is easy to use and enables transfer from SharePoint Online (or other cloud-based tools) without loss of metadata or integrity.

For this Alpha we are looking for solution(s) for the transfer of records from departmental cloud-based information management systems to TNA. This includes designing the approach and delivering a working prototype / proof of concept which demonstrates secure transfer of a government department's digital records from SharePoint Online to The National Archives, via the Transfer Digital Records (TDR) service.

GCloud service id 297874369314721