Digital Preservation at the Washington State Archives

Adam Jansen

Deputy State Archivist

Washington State Archives

What is ‘Archiving’ in the Electronic Age?

Protecting machine readable records of enduring legal, historical or fiscal value from loss, alteration, deterioration and technological obsolescence in a environment independent from that which produced the record.

Mission of the Digital Archives

• Collect electronic records of enduring legal, historical or fiscal value

• Maintain these records in perpetuity in a useable state for the good of the public

• Make records that are discloseable accessible to the public

Public Records

As defined in RCW 40.14

ANY records that have been made by or received by any agency of the state of Washington in connection with the transaction of public business

Redefining Public• Avg over 650 researchers per day• Avg length of stay over 6 minutes• 6% .gov - 4% .edu - 1% .org• 13% came from Internet Search (Google,

MSN, Yahoo)• Researchers from 131 foreign countriesResearchers from:Canada, US Military, Romania, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, UK,

Netherlands, Russia, Thailand, Portugal, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Indonesia, Singapore, Sweden, Mexico, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Hungary, Brazil, Norway, Columbia, Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, China, Yugoslavia, Philippines, Spain, South Korea, Denmark, Oman, Pakistan, South Africa, Jamaica, Switzerland

Records and Informationor, Why we do what we do

If - Information is power…

And - Records are storage of information

Then – Records must be preserved for future generations

Why?

The foundation of democracy in America is government accountability to the people

New Federal Mandates to Manage Certain Electronic Records

As electronic records become more integrated into society, producers of those records will be held to higher standards of conduct

• Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)

• Gramm-Leach-Billey Act of 1999

• Patriot Act of 2001

• Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002

• Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)

• More mandates to come

Records must be managed and destroyed methodically in normal course of business

Why a Digital Archives?• Comply with statutory & regulatory mandates.

– The Law requires preservation of certain public records – it doesn’t

specify whether those records are paper or electronic. All records

must be given the same care.

• Avoid loss of legal & historical records

– As technology changes, the older media (5 ¼” floppy disks, for

instance) become harder to read.

• Preserve rare and ‘at-risk’ paper records

• Centralize Records

– Centralization means uniformity in maintenance

– ‘Trained professionals’ serve as caretakers

• Improved access for citizens

– By centralizing historical electronic records in one location, ‘one-stop

shopping’ will provide the information quicker and easier

What the Digital Archives is not

• Not mass storage for active business applications & data

• Not remote back-up for state & local government networks & data

The Digital Archives will:

• Preserve electronic records with long-term legal, historical and/or fiscal significance

• Assure platform-neutral retrieval 50, 100, or more years from now

• Provide security back-up of certain permanent electronic legal records (courts, vital records, land records, etc.)

Data Security

• Encrypted SSH FTP transmission

• Issue Digital Certificate

• Verify IP and computer information

• MD5 Hash on all original files

• Copy of FTP on tape prior to ingestion

• DB backups on tape

• Record Level Security for confidential Info

Digital Archives New Projects

Email Archiving

• Permanent, executive level correspondence

• Sent as .pst, .msg

• Store ALL email, even the ‘junk’

• Transfer from proprietary into open database

• Full text search

• Attachments stored separately, migratable

Capturing the Web

• Web pages are how we ‘do business’

• Universally accessible to public, 24x7

• Information repository

• Captures history, business of agency

• Important to ‘archive’ news, forms

• Cannot capture ‘deep web’ content

Maps and Photos

• Stores oversized maps and high resolution photos

• Converts images to compressed format for viewing over the web

• Provides thumbnails for searching

• Uses LoC metadata indexing standards

• Search on title, description

• E-commerce to order photo-reproductions

“Anything that you do today, will need a major overhaul in two years”

Technology and industry changing at unprecedented rates… But, more records are ‘lost’ every day!

– Key is to be flexible and attack with forethought

Digital Archives @ Eastern Washington University, Cheney, Washington

Questions?Questions?

Adam JansenAdam JansenDeputy State ArchivistDeputy State Archivistajansen@secstate.wa.govajansen@secstate.wa.gov