Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

8 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Well, by chewy_2000 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Personally I would find this, or something like it, very useful in research, even as just an undergrad History major. The amount of times I've wished for something like this while digging around in musty old archives...

    Although, it has to be said, I hope they make everything accessable for *everyone*, regardless of OS and browser. No doubt a lot of researchers would be using OS X/Linux/Firefox.

  2. Search capabilities by vinukr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One thing that they have to concentrate on in the future when the number of records grow fast is a nice search strategy. Time taken for search is one thing that can make the mass use this facility.

    As far as i have tried it out in these few minutes, the search strategy is good... there are separate search that researchers can use to know historical data and the like... This is great.

  3. Privacy by chewy_2000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The site seems to be slowing a bit, so I can't find details, but surely there are some privacy concerns here. I know that this just replicates the publically avaliable material in the physical archives, but there is a big difference between going to the archives and digging through books, and harvesting info over the web, especially given the sheer amount of info on the site, many of them recent records.

    1. Re:Privacy by chewy_2000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Try reading what I said. Data mining, the wholesale collection of personal data, is made, I assume, an order of magnitude simpler using an online system vs microfiche or whatever. I would consider this an abuse of the system. I am in no way suggesting the records should have access restricted, this is just a new problem raised by the tech that needs to be addressed.

    2. Re:Privacy by lamona · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Absolutely. Making "public" records available universally is a different meaning to "public" in public records in situ. Although the word "public" was used, it really meant the local community. When you change that to "everyone in the world with internet access" you change the context in which the data resides... and for data, context is everything. For one thing, it narrows the scope to a small portion of the population so that accurate identification (or, conversely, less mistaken identity) is facilitated.

      Making it difficult to get to the records DOES provide some privacy, and that is the level of privacy to which we've become accustomed. It's like the difference between your Aunt Mable having a listed phone in the phone book for her town of 2,000, and having her phone listed in the internet white pages. She allowed her phone to be listed because she is a part of that community and feels secure there. She probably doesn't feel the same way about being "visible" beyond that community.

      What this means is that we are going to have to either revise how we define "public", or we're going to have to get used to a different view on privacy. I'd prefer the former.

      no sig, .sig

      --
      I just read /. for the amusing .sigs
  4. no maps? by Apreche · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Dang, there are no maps in there. The best stuff in the archives at town hall have always been maps of the town and blueprints of various buildings. But nobody scanned those in the archives. Oh well.

    --
    The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
  5. Re:Digital twilight. by LousyPhreak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    you still can move the data from the old system to a new one if its at the end of its lifetime.

    harddrives can easily be replaced (assuming its a sort of raid with hotswap)

    sql will also stay around really long, and if not there will be at least a gazillion tools to convert to a new format (it is quite sure that the data will be stored on a sql server)

    and as long as the data is safely stored the access mechnism shouldnt be a problem but thats just my .02

    --
    -- Karma: beyond good and evil - mostly affected by posting political
  6. Re:Not 800 Terabytes, & using DjVu by illtud · · Score: 3, Insightful
    5TB ? that's like 18 of those 400G Hitachi drives, that go for 411 USD a piece these days. if you include the bi-opteron box, and a couple of 3ware Sata cards, that's a total investment of 20 grand or so...

    ...come back when you've worked in the real world (or looked at an EMC price list...!)