Transcript Getting 'Digi' with it

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
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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 countries
Researchers 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 Information
or, 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
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Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA)
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Gramm-Leach-Billey Act of 1999
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Patriot Act of 2001
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Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002
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Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)
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More mandates to come
Records must be managed and destroyed methodically in
normal course of business
Why a Digital Archives?
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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.
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Avoid loss of legal & historical records
– As technology changes, the older media (5 ¼” floppy disks, for
instance) become harder to read.
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Preserve rare and ‘at-risk’ paper records
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Centralize Records
– Centralization means uniformity in maintenance
– ‘Trained professionals’ serve as caretakers
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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
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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
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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?
Adam Jansen
Deputy State Archivist
[email protected]