"A number of agencies are keen; for a lot it's a change in mindset from paper to digital," she said. "That's something to address."

The NAA estimates the cost of digitizing its existing paper content would be "in the billions", but it will continue offering "digitization on demand".

"What we keep inside the digital archive is born digital that's been given to us for preservation," Pearson said, adding if the content is paper, it won't be stored in the new digital storage system unless there is a good reason.

"When we have multiple terabytes and get beyond prototype we would like to have off-site backups and may completely forget about any tape backups," he said, adding conservation is imperative.

"The record is king and everything else is secondary."