National Archives' Digital Woes

Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The National Archives, entrusted to preserve America's official history, will have to handle roughly 100 million emails from the Bush White House, up from 32 million during the Clinton years, according to the Wall Street Journal. 'The rapid adoption of electronic communications technology in the last decade has created a major crisis for the Archives,' the Journal reports. 'For one thing, the amount of data to be preserved has exploded in recent years, thanks to the proliferation of high-tech tools such as personal computers and wireless email devices such as BlackBerries. At the same time, technology is becoming obsolete so fast that electronic documents created today may not be legible on tomorrow's devices, the equivalent of trying to play an eight-track tape on an iPod.' The director of the Electronic Records Archives Program tells the Journal, 'We don't want to turn into a Cyber-Williamsburg, a place that keeps old technologies alive.'"

Comments

Re:some funny math

[Wildfire Darkstar]

Speaking as a trained archivist, I can say that the problem isn't finding storage space for the e-mails, per se. It's the duty and responsibility of the National Archives to preserve both content and context, and to ensure that these e-mails remain accessible for however long the retention schedules call for (which, in the case of executive communication, is not an insignificant length of time). Which means that the problem cannot be satisfactorily solved by dumping every e-mail onto a hard drive somewhere and forgetting about them. They all need to be indexed and cataloged, and provisions need to be made to ensure that the data can be migrated onto newer technology when it becomes necessary to do so without losing any of the information (or metadata) associated with it.

The volume of material is staggering, and goes beyond what NARA (or almost anyone else, for that matter) has traditionally dealt with. While storage space itself is a concern, to some degree, given that this material will continue to accumulate, the larger problem is how to manage this material. Having 800GB of e-mail is pointless if you don't provide a means to get in and retrieve specific messages, and provide the appropriate context for that e-mail.