Washington State Archives Go Digital

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."

Comments

Digital twilight.

[haeger]

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