Highlights Archives
Preserving Electronic Records
The Society, by statute, is "the ultimate depository of the archives of the state." This mandate was easy to fill in the 19th century, when the records of a governor were all written on paper and fit in a few boxes. But today, 90 percent of government records are created electronically, and state workers write or receive 2 million emails each day. Clearly, new types of boxes are needed. So much government information is being created digitally that no staff of archivists could ever evaluate it all and select the most important documents.
All governments face this problem of proliferating electronic records, and none have developed a permanent solution. Not even the National Archives in Washington knows exactly how to guarantee permanent access to the deluge of government records never put on paper. The Society recently joined a handful of states that are exploring one potential solution to the problem.
Called the "Persistent Digital Archives and Library System" or (PeDALS) project, it is financed by the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Five states — Arizona, Florida, New York, South Carolina and Wisconsin — are fashioning a system to automatically take in electronic records deemed historically important and safely store them. The PeDALS project is both a learning opportunity and a chance to implement a functioning system.
Since there are too many new electronic records for humans to evaluate on an item- or even file-folder basis, PeDALS archivists are trying to create an automated, rules-based system to process collections of electronic records. The goal is an inexpensive storage system that can preserve the integrity and authenticity of electronic records over time, while keeping costs as low as possible. Society electronic records archivist Dennis Bitterlich heads the project in Wisconsin.
Bitterlich expects it to work this way: based on descriptive metadata applied by the records-creating agencies, the PeDALS rules-based software would automatically harvest electronic records using a version of Microsoft BizTalk. It would also check them for authenticity, integrity, restrictions and any viruses or malware. Using the well-known .xml capability for "tagging" and "marking" files, the records would be saved, in their original formats for long-term storage in a system known as LOCKSS — an acronym for "lots of copies keep stuff safe" — which is used widely by major document repositories. The LOCKSS approach maintains multiple electronic backups of every document in separate geographic locations, scanning for file corruption and other data integrity problems. Public copies would be accessible over the Web.
The PeDALS grant will run until the end of 2009, and at the end of the project each of the five partners should have a functioning electronic records repository. Under the LOCKSS system, these will contain not only each state's records but also those of the other partners. Questions can be addressed to dennis.bitterlich@wisconsinhistory.org.
:: Posted November 17, 2008
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