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

Plain Text

[CWRUisTakingMyMoney]

What's to keep NARA from converting most electronic record to plain text? Surely most communications are only text themselves, so formats wouldn't be an issue there. For more complex files, OpenDocument is an option, or just any Open format. On the good side, this would make searching the archives fantastically efficient. NARA is already making some fomerly-paper records into electronic, searchable records. Imagine if everything were like that.

One Word: Google

[Nova Express]

Really, either Internal or External. Take out anything that might injure National Security, then turn the rest over for Google to index. Hell, send a copy of everything to Google, for that matter; they've got room. Keep a record of searches and visits to documents by codeword and frequency and build index that way. Create a datasea, index it, and let citizens swim in it. As long as the e-mail is in at least a remotely standard format, what's the problem?

(Note: Asserting a simple solution to a complex problem is the best way to elicit information, as it creates a burning desire in readers to prove you're wrong...)