The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) needs to give more attention to the preservation of electronic records and to using digital technology to make more of its existing records accessible to the public, says H. Thomas Hickerson, associate university librarian for information technology and special collections at Cornell.
Hickerson, who is the president of the Society of American Archivists, offered these opinions on Oct. 13 in Washington, D.C., at a NARA oversight hearing of the Congressional Subcommittee on Government Management, Information and Technology, a subcommittee of the Committee on Government Reform. He urged more research and support for the preservation of historical data in electronic form. "I probably expressed a greater sense of urgency regarding electronic records than John Carlin, the archivist of the United States," Hickerson said later.
Hickerson cited a report of the House Committee on Government Operations, "Taking a Byte Out of History: The Archival Preservation of Federal Computer Records," submitted Nov. 6, 1990, which outlined the importance of preserving digital records, and asserted that insufficient action had resulted from that report. "We are all a decade behind, and we are only now beginning to confront the issues of long-term preservation and use of digital information in a serious fashion," he told the committee.
NARA, he said, has decided to concentrate on systems for managing records newly created in digital form and put on hold any plans to convert its existing records. While praising NARA efforts in the first area, Hickerson also urged that more resources be devoted to converting existing paper records to digital images and making them available via the Internet.
"Our archives should be available in classrooms, lecture halls, libraries, offices and homes, as well as everywhere else," he said, noting that over 90 percent of members of the Association of Research Libraries are conducting or planning projects to digitally convert unique collections.
The committee spent considerable time discussing plans for preservation of the household response forms to be used in the 2000 census. In the recent past, the forms have been microfilmed. For the 2000 census, the proposal is to scan the forms into a computer and perform optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the information on the form to computer text, which will be stored on magnetic tape. In whatever form they are saved, the records will not be available to the public for 72 years, a legal requirement to protect the privacy of respondents.
Hickerson points out some problems with this idea. First, the system promises 98 percent accuracy, but the one character that isn't translated correctly might be the first letter of a name, or the last digit of a date or some other change that might make the historical record less useful. And to preserve the computer files over the years, they will have to be copied and recopied many times. "We certainly believe this is feasible, but we haven't done it for 72 years yet," Hickerson said in an interview. "We have to make certain that what we're preserving is a usable body of information. Alternatives being considered, he said, are traditional microfilming or scanning and saving digital images of the pages.
Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.), chair of the committee, noted that the growth of digital records could spark a need for more archivists, and he asked Hickerson if the educational system is capable of turning out as many as would be needed. Hickerson replied, "Probably the current programs will not produce enough graduates, and increased focus on electronic record-keeping is needed."
Hickerson also argued that more effort needs to be put into research to ensure that electronic records do not become obsolete with the rapid changes of computer technology over time. Two projects on digital record preservation have been funded by phase two of the National Digital Library Initiative, one at Cornell and another at the University of Michigan; but Hickerson told the committee that much more research is needed. "We are all way behind the curve on this issue," he said. "We are losing valuable information today, and more will be lost tomorrow. This is the Y2K that will not go away next year."
The complete text of Hickerson's testimony is available on the World Wide Web at http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct99/Hickerson-testimony.html.
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