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Washington State Archives Go Digital

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sunshine-laws dept.

prostoalex writes "USA Today and dozens of others report that Washington state archives went online. Over the past two years project participants scanned 1 million documents issued by state and country authorities. The archive is located in my alma mater Eastern Washington University (go Eagles!) The 800 terabyte storage system was developed by Microsoft and EDS."

6 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. WWW address by JamesD_UK · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just in case someone actually wanted the address for the archives it's http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/

    1. Re:WWW address by El+Cubano · · Score: 4, Informative

      Just in case someone actually wanted the address for the archives it's http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/

      FYI. Turn on cookies or you receive this extremely helpful error message:

      An error occured on the site. Please try again or come back another time.

      Otherwise, it's pretty cool.

  2. Just another link (or two) by Neumsy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Posting on EDS site

    From the NYSE Site

    --
    %blow
    %blow: No such job

    ^how did the sex change go?
    Modifier failed
  3. NB Archives by X-Phile · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Province of New Brunswick Provincial Archives have been like this for quite some time now, with birth, death, marriage certs and census records. I have been able to search for information about my family history online using their handy dandy search tool, as well as visiting the Archives themselves at University of New Brunswick. It never occurred to me that others might be trying catching up, but I guess that this type of service isn't something that most governments deem necessary for the public.

    --
    "Well you're not Fiona Apple, and if you're not Fionna Apple, I don't give a rat's ass."
  4. Re:Well, by ImaLamer · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm using Firefox (from Windows sadly) and I can access the content just fine.

    As for OSX and Linux users, there is a plug in for viewing the content needed. But they report to support OSX and "UNIX". The plug-in is called DjVu and has an open source equivalent at sourceforge (with RPMs, OS/2 and even Cygwin support).

    --
    Get your Unix fortune now!
  5. Not 800 Terabytes, & using DjVu by illtud · · Score: 4, Informative

    The system isn't 800TB, but will scale to 800TB, according to this EDS press release. In fact, given that they've spent a mere $2.5M (powerpoint!) there's not a hope in hell that they've got 800TB! The powerpoint says it's a 5TB EMC SAN & an ADIC tape library for backup.

    An interesting point is that they're delivering the documents using DjVu by Lizardtech, which is GPLd, and developed by the creators of DjVu in conjuction with LizardTech (after a period of LT not-getting-it). The DjVuLibre home page is here. LizardTech still have the best encoders for the format.