The July issue of Technology Review has a couple articles on records management and archiving in the federal government.
Records management and archive preservation is an issue that really hits home with me. I’m married to an historian who regularly sings the praises of librarians and special collections people who have digitized their holdings, or merely posted a catalog of their holdings online. Many 19th century documents are in private collections, some in university libraries, some in county historical societies, some in government agencies. Finding a document that you’re pretty sure existed sometimes takes months. In most cases, the best sources are librarians and other researchers, rather than technology. The U.S. Coast Survey, for example, was commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to produce maps of the coastal United States. Since then, the agency, its mission and the maps have been reorganized several times. The Coast Survey eventually morphed into United States Coast & Geodetic Survey in NOAA and the maps are at NARA. If not for the clerks and librarians who know what holdings got filed where, whole tracts of our history would be lost.
FCW regularly covers NARA and records management, if you’re looking for more specific info on the topic. Slashdot has a page of commentary on the TR article that covers the technology and philosophy of mass storage.
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