One of the more exasperating things about travel (and particularly holiday travel) is the dearth of time that I seem to have for sitting down and thinking (and then posting) about things that I want to discuss–and I’ve been doing a lot of traveling over the past few months. Something that I’ve been thinking about in both a general,and more specific sense is the access and use of electronic records. I don’t have time to get into my own project and thoughts now,but I wanted to share a general article about the transfer of the Bush documents to NARA. The AP article really doesn’t get into the ingest process and anticipated entry into the ERA,but a I wanted to share a quick quote that I found to be really interesting:
”The electronic-records archives system may be able to take in a tremendous amount of e-mail and other records,”Brachfeld said. “But just because you ingest the data does not mean that people can locate,identify,recover and use the records they need.”
Full article from The Columbus Dispatch: Bush’s electronic data a major archiving task
Hope everyone had a safe and lovely holiday break–and I’m hoping to be back on the blog more often once I make it home!
Brachfield is a napoleonic lttle figure who seeks out a chance to comment and get his name known throughout the world anyway which way he can. He is the IG of NARA,a former secret service agent who would never take a bullet,a loser. He knows nothing of records. Don’t trust the bitch.
Whatever one may think of Mr. Brachfeld (that’s the right spelling),he has a point. Having the records ingested into the ERA system does not mean that “people can locate,identify,recover and use the records they need.”I think most people familiar with the project have as many doubts about it as the commeter above seems to have about NARA’s IG.