From Basement to Citizen: An Integrated Approach to the Digitisation, Preservation and Access to Environmental Permits
Sofie Ruysseveldt and Ruben Van Driessche (Digital Archives Flanders)
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Local authorities in Flanders (Belgium) manage large volumes of environmental permit files, such as building permits, subdivision permits and environmental permits. These files have long‑term legal, administrative and societal value. They are needed not only while a permit is processed, but also many years later for inspections, disputes, renovations, property sales or public information requests. Historically, these records were often stored in paper archives or spread across disconnected digital systems. This made them difficult to access, time‑consuming to manage and vulnerable to loss, damage or inconsistency.
This initiative was developed to address those challenges through collaboration rather than isolated solutions. Its central ambition was to help local authorities move from fragmented, hybrid practices towards a sustainable digital way of working, without requiring each organisation to develop its own complex infrastructure. Instead of focusing on a single system or tool, the project treats digitisation, long‑term preservation and access as one coherent chain, supported by shared agreements on processes, data and responsibilities.
At the core of the approach is a central framework agreement for the digitisation of administrative documents. This agreement allows local authorities to digitise large volumes of archived paper files in a legally compliant and quality‑controlled way, without having to run individual procurement procedures. By coordinating this at a central level, expertise, standards and costs are shared, lowering the barrier for participation, particularly for smaller organisations.
Collaboration also plays a key role in how information itself is described and managed. Together, local authorities, information managers and software providers agreed on common metadata, file structures and naming conventions for environmental permit files. These shared descriptions ensure that records can be reliably found, interpreted and reused across systems, organisations and over time, reducing ambiguity and manual work.
For long‑term preservation, the project relies on the Digital Archives Flanders (DAV) E‑depot, a shared service available to local authorities and other public organisations. The E‑depot applies internationally recognised digital preservation principles and ensures that records remain authentic, reliable and accessible over time. By using a shared preservation service, local authorities do not need to maintain their own archival infrastructure, which would be costly, complex and difficult to keep up to date.
Digitised files do not enter the DAV E-depot unmanaged. A shared pre‑ingest platform supports automated and human quality control before files are accepted for long‑term preservation. This ensures that scans are complete, readable, correctly structured and correctly linked to their descriptive metadata before being stored permanently. Quality issues can be corrected early, preventing problems later in the lifecycle of the records.
A key achievement of the initiative is the direct integration between the DAV E‑depot and the permit management software used by local authorities. Through this integration, archiving is embedded directly in daily administrative processes. When a permit file reaches the appropriate stage in its lifecycle, it is transferred automatically to the digital archive, together with its metadata. This approach, known as archiving by design, ensures that preservation is not an afterthought but a natural part of the administrative workflow.
The integration also enables information preserved in the archive to be reused efficiently. Files can be consulted directly from within the permit management software, allowing staff to access archived information without switching systems. Selected documents can also be made available to citizens through existing Flemish digital platforms, such as Woningpas (Building Pass), providing transparent access to legally available information about properties.
Collaboration is central to the success of the project. Local authorities, Flemish government agencies, software vendors, digitisation providers and digital preservation experts worked together to align legal requirements, technical standards, descriptive metadata and practical workflows. This cooperation ensures that information remains consistent, trustworthy and usable across organisational and technical boundaries.
The result is a practical, end‑to‑end blueprint that local authorities can adopt step by step. It reduces administrative burden, avoids duplication of effort and improves the reliability and accessibility of permit information. Staff spend less time searching for documents or responding to information requests, while citizens benefit from clearer and more consistent access to public records.
Importantly, the initiative was designed to be reusable and extensible. Although it was developed for environmental permit files, the underlying principles - shared services, agreed metadata, controlled ingest, system integration and archiving by design - can be applied to other types of government records. Central coordination of standards and services ensures continuity over time and resilience to technological change.
By combining shared infrastructure, agreed information standards and close cooperation between partners, the project demonstrates how digital preservation can function not as a specialised back‑office activity, but as a shared public service embedded in everyday administration. It shows how collaboration enables sustainable digital preservation at scale, benefiting organisations, professionals and citizens alike.
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