Washington state to create digital archives

Computerworld - The Washington Secretary of State's Office yesterday broke ground on a building that will house the state's history recorded through e-mails and electronic documents.
Secretary of State Sam Reed said his research indicates that Washington is the first state government to establish digital archives in the country.
Although the state has done a good job maintaining and preserving paper documents, which are also transferred to microfilm, it has done nothing to ensure that its electronic records are stored for posterity, Reed said.
As a result, much of the state's heritage was slipping away because there was no way to record and archive its electronic history, including e-mail, government Web pages and government databases -- all of which are a matter of public record in the state.
According to Reed, most of the state's public agencies have already lost about 50% of their various electronic records, including e-mail from governors, key legislators and elected officials. In addition, Reed said, the state is also missing records of policy drafts that reveal the thinking behind current legislation.
Reed acknowledged that there's a debate raging in the state about what exactly qualifies as a public record, with much of the controversy centering on the archiving of e-mail.
The $14.3 million, 48,000 square-foot archive building is set to open its doors in the winter of 2004, and will be located on the Eastern Washington University campus in Cheney.
In 15 years it will have the capacity to hold 800TB-worth of government information, or 200 billion pages of text, Reed said. That same information stored as paper documents would fill 80 million standard archive boxes stacked 270 feet high and would run the length of a football field, he said.

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