The Smithsonian Institution
Archives (SIA) and the
Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) are engaged in a collaborative
three-year project to develop, test, and share the technology to
preserve digital documents with other non-profit organizations. SIA and
RAC will develop and test electronic records preservation, focusing on
e-mail, that will draw on the SIA’s more established framework for
developing methodologies, and that will draw on the RAC’s network of
donor institutions for testing the preservation system and strategies.
Working together they expect not only to achieve much more than they
could accomplish separately, but they expect to develop a model that
should have implications for a broad range of nonprofit and
philanthropic institutions.
Archival institutions, which provide permanent access to information
deemed vital to understanding the history of individuals and
organizations, are encountering the loss of digitally-created
information before it even crosses their thresholds. Given modern
digital forms of information, the long-term preservation of electronic
records, particularly e-mail, will be critically important for scholars
looking at the first decade of the 21st century, as well as for
organizational accountability.
Yet few institutions have taken significant steps toward
preservation, in part because there are few accepted standards for such
preservation in the archival world. Much of the electronic information
created by institutions now becomes inaccessible or is intentionally
destroyed within a few months or a few years of creation. This is true
for the offices and organizations for which the Rockefeller Archive
Center and the Smithsonian Institution Archives have archival
responsibilities, as well as for virtually all other nonprofit
institutions.
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