Digital Records Useful Info

Date of document: This is almost impossible to determine for digital records without individually opening and reading each document. We have over 249 million digital records in our collection so this isn’t feasible for us. The best way of finding a document by its date of creation/publication is to put that date into the search box. Where a date of document has been provided as a result of a scoping exercise and therefore has a degree of uncertainty around it, the date is written in square brackets.

Date last modified: This is the date it’s easiest for us to capture in an automated way. It’s not the date that a document was created or published but the date that somebody last made changes to it. Any processing of a digital document can alter its recorded modified date, e.g. us uploading it onto this website, even if this occurs 10 years after the document is created.

Records that won’t open: Some digital records are created using rare pieces of software or were created using software that is now out of date and defunct, resulting in a rare type of file or file format. At present some of these rare file formats will not be able to be opened using this website. We’re working on solutions to this.

Size: A digital record can be very small or it can be very large. We’re unable in our catalogue to differentiate between different measurement terminologies and therefore have decided to represent the size of all digital records in KB.

Title of record: To enable us to provide access to digital records as quickly as possible we’re processing and cataloguing them at speed using automated processes. This is the only way to cope with the volume of the digital collection, however it does mean that we’re inheriting record titles as assigned by the original creator of the record and these may not always be meaningful or well spelt! We do make corrections and amendments where time permits.