Thank you to all 157 attendees who joined us for the August 2025 PRIME network meeting. We’re thrilled to see such a high number of attendees at the meeting, the biggest for 2025, and we’re equally chuffed to have received positive feedback post meeting.

For anyone who was unable to attend the meeting, or you want to go over key information again, please see below for a summary of what was discussed.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THIS MEETING

Decommissioning Legacy Systems

The Digital Archive Team presented on this meeting’s theme: migrating public records from systems that have been scheduled for decommissioning. The presentation highlighted the risks and challenges of keeping public records on legacy systems that are no longer secure or supported and explored the key tasks involved in successfully migrating records and their accompanying metadata across business systems. These include:

• Determining what is to be migrated
• Determining where and how to migrate
• Verifying quality assurance during and after migration

Draft Mandatory Standards and Supporting Guidelines

The Policy team covered off on the fantastic feedback received from round 2 of our practitioner feedback survey for the draft Mandatory Standards and supporting guidelines. In total, there were 116 survey responses, with 2,210 individual free-text comments and 6,045 responses to multiple choice questions.

What the feedback shows us so far

When asked if a requirement and it’s associated sub-requirements were supported in full, this data revealed overwhelming support with 6 out of 8 of the requirements having at least a 94% support rating.

Mandatory Standard 1.3 (MS1.3) Make accurate metadata about a public record, received an 86% support rating and Mandatory Standard 2.3 (MS2.3) Disposal is managed and accountable received an 83O% support rating.

Points to be considered

• The need to consider whether to refer to both Records and Information Management – or records management by itself?
• Some wording was felt to be ambiguous, such as meaningful, reasonable, practicable. Some we have taken out, while others, like “whenever practicable”, we will provide further clarification of the intent in the associated guidelines.
• We received some great suggested rewording – some we accepted in its entirety, because it provided greater clarity. Others, we workshopped internally to refine and subsequently amended the requirement to better reflect the intent.

The Policy team then covered off on our continuing consultation with public authorities, advising that in early September QSA is intending to email Chief Executives of public authorities a survey with the revised draft Mandatory Standards.

They also spoke about our consultation work with the community and the separate survey available to members of the public on the “Get involved” website with four questions focused on the new requirements.  

The CEO survey and community survey were both open until 2^nd October 2025. Data analysis began after the surveys closing and QSA will consider feedback to determine whether there needs to be any further refinement of the standards.

QSA is keen to progress the draft Mandatory Standards as soon as possible to support public authorities with clear expectations and guidance about implementation of the Public Records Act 2023.  It is expected the Mandatory Standards will not commence before 1 July 2026.

Disaster recovery preparedness

With disaster season seemingly starting earlier each year, the PRIME Network meeting was wrapped up with some reminders and resources to get public authorities thinking about getting a head start on preparing for disaster season.

Getting prepared for disaster season

1. Identify and Prioritise High-Value and High-Risk Records

• Do you have any permanent value records that could be eligible for transfer to QSA or records to be returned to our file issue services?
• Your records team should already know which records are high value, high risk or vital. If not, make it a priority to identify these
• Make it a habit to return high-value, high-risk records to secure storage areas so they are in the safest place should a weather even occur

2. Inspect your records storage areas regularly

• It’s vital to regularly monitor records storage areas to ensure they can withstand incoming disaster seasons or have not been damaged from previous weather events
• Identify potential weak spots and make a plan to improve them

3. Think about safety or preventative measures you may be able to put in place

• Moving high value records to the safest area
• Putting plastic sheeting over records in areas prone to leaking
• Preparing a toolkit for salvaging damaged records

Resources and Tools for Disaster Preparedness

Disaster management for public records | For government | Queensland Government

Disaster Preparedness – 5 tips to help you prepare to protect your records

A Guide to Salvaging Water Damaged Documents – Stories from the Archives

Salvaging water-damaged documents and photos

STAY UP TO DATE WITH THE LATEST NEWS

Keep tuned into our various communications channels to stay up to date with the latest news from QSA:

• See our News and Events page
• Sign up to our Agency newsletter here Update from the Archivesand read previous editions here
• Check out our blog for posts on contemporary records management issues affecting the Queensland Public sector, summaries of our PRIME CoP meetings and summaries of other activities such as consultations
• Register your interest to join our community of practice: Register for PRIME Network