State’s digital archive opens
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, October 10, 2004
CHENEY – Washington has opened what is believed to be the nation’s first digital archives for state government, holding everything from birth records to the first election results in Washington Territory in 1854.
Housed in a new building on the Eastern Washington University campus, the $14.5 million Washington State Digital Archives makes certain records and electronic documents available without fear of damage.
“This type of information is made to be used; you won’t hurt it over the Internet,” Chelan County Auditor Evelyn Arnold said. “Any time we can help our public in getting the information that is truly theirs, that is a great step forward.”
The archive’s Web address is www.digitalarchives.wa.gov.
Volunteers have transcribed nearly 1 million scanned images of historic files over the past two years, State Archivist Jerry Handfield said.
The census records, for example, contain county demographic information from 1847-1892. Also included are naturalization records ranging from 1854-1988, depending on the county, and marriage records dating back to 1900.
Certified copies of documents can be purchased through a secure channel, eliminating the need to travel to Olympia or county courthouses where the paperwork is filed, digital archivist Adam Jansen said.
E-mails and other electronic documents from state agencies also will be preserved in the future, Handfield said.
The archive is a pet project of Secretary of State Sam Reed, who called it “the first state-of-the-art facility like this in the nation.”
The archive’s digital storage system, which could eventually grow to 800 terabytes – the equivalent of 200 billion pages of text – was developed by Microsoft and EDS.
Unlike paper records that can be changed, damaged or lost, electronic records will be protected by a digital “lock,” redundant copies and offsite backups, Reed said.
“Authentic records build trust in government,” Reed said. “Our mission is to preserve our day-to-day successes and failures for people who will live in this state 100 years from now and beyond.”
