This retention and disposal authority describes the circumstances and conditions under which the destruction of the original digital source records which have been used as the input or source records for successful migration operations is permitted under the provisions of the State Records Act 1998.

This authority is required because the process of migrating records yields two versions of the same record. The original record, known as the source record, continues to exist after a new version of it has been created by the migration process. In the majority of circumstances, there is no business need to retain both the source record and the new migrated version of the record.

Migration can be a complex process. When dealing with records that support high risk business processes or have long term retention requirements, it is particularly important to ensure the migrated records can be relied on and used in place of the original source records for business, legal and accountability purposes for as long as they are required to be retained. The migration process needs to be appropriately performed and checked before the records created during the migration can be regarded as authentic copies of the original source records and before the source records can then be destroyed.

This authority therefore establishes conditions that must be met before public offices are authorised to destroy source records that have been successfully migrated.

Downloadable copies of this general retention and disposal authority are available at: https://staterecords.nsw.gov.au/recordkeeping/guidance-and-resources/source-records-have-been-migrated-ga48