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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."

9 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Digital twilight. by haeger · · Score: 4, Interesting
    How about the "Digital Twilight" that people have talked about? One of the big problems with these kind of archives is that they aren't permanent the way that paper is. Washington could very easily end up the way that Stasi did in East Germany. They have several hundred tapes of data with information about every spy in the west on them but the information is still "safe" since noone no longer knows how the data was saved to disk or which file format was used.

    And I'm still ignoring the fact that machines grow old and has to be replaced. It's a known fact that disks break so You'll need backup but how long could You keep an old storage solution around. Sooner or later You'll have to migrate old backup data to newer media.

    Note that I don't think that this is a bad idea, moving everything online, but there are concequences that I don't think that everyone has thought of.

    Where I live one can go into the royal library and find (and read) an official document written by someone in the 16:th century, but can we be sure that 100 or even 50 years from now someone can read a DLT300-tape?

    .haeger

    --
    You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
  2. Perfect by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Oh, great. When (not if) Microsoft is brought to court for antitrust violations again, all MonkeyBoy has to do is enter a secret backdoor password and, *poof* all those documents containing damning evidence suddenly go "missing" -- or perhaps they simply disappear from the index as if they never existed.

    Would you trust a known pedophile to give your kids a bath? If not, then why trust a convicted monopolist who is on the record for purgery with critical documents?

    --
    Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
  3. Re:no maps? by mikael · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maps and/or aerial photographs combined together make the best time-lapse animation. It's amazing to see the growth of a city all the way from the first harbour/warehouse in Roman times to the metropolised supercity of today.

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  4. Go Eagles! by Pcghost · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The digital archives is a big step for my University. Five years ago we were facing a hostile take over by the drunken WSU, now Eastern is the fastest growing University in the state. The Microsoft focus is to be expected. Redmond pays a lot of money to keep universities in our state in line. Rest assured Eastern is loaded with disgruntled Linux users being forced to learn Visual Basic in their IT courses. There are even a few IT profs pushing for changes, though they haven't made much headway in their efforts.

    1. Re:Go Eagles! by Sta7ic · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Fastest growing because we still have something like space. With WSU or UW not taking anyone with less than a 3.6 GPA for reasons of overcrowding, and in-state tuition being around $1200 for 12-18 credits, this place isn't half bad. But our math department was ranked the absolute worst in the state of Washington between the four and two year colleges last year, which seems to hamstring progression through the CS department. One of our profs has a dubious reputation after 3/4 of the class failed a 300-level probability and sadistics class, which included both seniors and graduate students.

      Oh, and with all these new students, almost three weeks in and the dorm networks are STILL on the fritz. This is an issue with the provider and the infrastructure, though.

  5. Re:NB Archives by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Yep! And my girlfriend's uncle works for NB's Provincial Archives! He talked to me about how simpler it's made their lives not to have to answer to a bunch of questions by phone and referring people to the website instead.

  6. What's the date format by Aidtopia · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Has anybody figured out the date formats? I'm seeing a lot like this "02001987". OK, it's either mmddyyyy or ddmmyyyy. But what does 00 mean for month or day? Unknown? It's hard to imagine that they don't have an exact date of death for someone who died as recently as 1987. Or is a zero-based counting system (00 = Jan, 01 = Feb, ...)?

    It's interesting that the death records include Social Security Numbers. Anybody want to harvest a few thousand inactive SSNs?

  7. Size is out of wack by Maxwell · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A TERABYTE IS 1000G. And 1G IS A 1000M. So A TERABYTE IS 1,000,000 MEGABYTES. Right?
    there are 1 million documents in this database? And it's 800 terabytes? So each doc is 800m in size?
    800m EACH? That's freaking huge. Even if the thing is only 8T in size (far more reasonable), each doc is still 8M in size. Again, pretty massive.

    is this like that time MSFT bragged about their 1T DB of geological data, and then Oracle
    built the same database, with the same content using only 300G of space?

    Inefficiency is nothing to brag about...or is it?

    JON

  8. Re:Privacy by dtjohnson · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This is a significant erosion of privacy. Governments require you to provide a lot of information for all sorts of things. Now, they are using new technology to make all of this information available to anyone anywhere in the world with a casual 2-minute search. Where will this stop? Tax records, medical records, personal property records, lawsuits, judgments, military records, etc. may all soon be posted online in this way. This is a first step towards that sort of future where anyone can easily sniff out all sorts of information about anyone. That will be a great tool for stalkers, criminals, identity thieves, etc. but for the rest of us, the loss of even a fig leaf of privacy will make our lives less enjoyable. An obvious first step would be to only provide this sort of information for people who are deceased.