Archives Found

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!

An article in the LA Times this morning stunned me: Reagan Library unable to fully account for 80,000 artifacts. I’m interested in finding out more about this, because I’m wondering about the status of the Reagan Papers. I think that the museum/artifacts staff and area is separated from the artifacts and donated items, but it obviously raises a lot of questions about security, access, and proper recordkeeping procedures. Talk about terrible publicity– and right before their C-Span broadcast, too. I wonder if any of the allegations will be addressed during their live broadcast tomorrow night? Unfortunately, I won’t be able to watch, as I’ll be traveling, but I’ll definitely look forward to catching it online later. I really hope that C-Span decides to rerun the episodes before the elections next year, and potentially at a better time/day of the week.

Yesterday a US District Court judge made a ruling regarding the witholding of documents based on President Bush’s 2001 executive order. NYT article here, more information in AP article here.