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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."
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.
Just in case someone actually wanted the address for the archives it's http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/
I feel safer already.
Posting on EDS site
From the NYSE Site
%blow
%blow: No such job
^how did the sex change go?
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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."
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.
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.
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?
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
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!
The 800 terabyte storage system was developed by Microsoft and EDS.
Microsoft was able to confirm the system is expandable, and contrary to previous rumours, will infact have enough disk space to install Longhorn.
They do however state, that to do anything actually useful, more upgrades will be required.
liqbase
http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
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.