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2005-07-16The End of the Historical Record?ACM News Service: The Fading Memory of the State. NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration has a painful job for preserving documents in the 16,000 software formats used by the federal government. This is aggrevated by the problem of “bit rot” which occurs much more rapidly with paper documents. NARA has contracted for a permanent Electronic Records Archive (ERA) that will handle present and future formats in an authentic, available and secure form. It is not clear how close we are to accomplishing digital preservation so handily. Meanwhile there is mention of an open-source XENA (XML Electronic Normalizing of Archives) being used in Australia. I want to know about that regardless of any reservations I have about the prospects for an ERA. David Talbott’s July 2005 Technology Review article is a great read, offering this daunting comparison: “The most famous documents in NARA's possession—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—were written on durable calfskin parchment and can safely recline for decades behind glass in a bath of argon gas. It will take a technological miracle to make digital data last that long.” The challenge is simply illustrated by the 2000 census data: 40 terabytes of TIFF images. And NARA has a miniscule proportion of the digitally-born documents that it must preserve, and it has no way to take receipt of them. (The Library of Congress is not part of NARA and is making its own provisions for digital preservation and availability.) The MIT DSpace project, another open-source effort, is an early example created to preserve scientific research data and papers. The ability to scale to the level of demand that NARA faces is completely untested, however.
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