Active Digital Archival Depots: State Archives of Netherlands e-Depot

In 2007, the Dutch government and the Dutch State Archives took an approach towards active digital archival preservation and widespread access by the development of what they termed an "e-Depot." Rather than acting as many U.S. organizations have, the Dutch wanted to begin some sort of storage and distribution center for digital archival materials to allow ingestion of the materials and access across departments/to the general public. U.S. organizations have this "catch-up" mentality, which is trying to get paper documents into digital formats while managing digital materials currently being created at the same time, with the result that we are constantly trying to get caught up with technology and the volume of digital materials. The Dutch State Archives has shifted its focus from this mentality towards "the realisation of a fully-fledged digital depot, whereby the ongoing accessibility of digital archives can be ensured, whereby digital archival records can be more effectively delivered to a wide audience, and whereby the transfer of digital archives from government departments to the State Archives Service can be made more efficient. The digital depot will enable the State Archives Service to accept and manage digital archival material" (http://en.nationaalarchief.nl/information-management-and-creation-of-archives/sustainable-management-of-digital-archiva-4).

A centrally-accessible repository for all--whether government, citizen, or archivist. Now that sounds extremely democratic to me, much more so than the current state of U.S. digital archival systems. A lot of this has to do obviously with the differences amongst the Dutch government/society compared and the U.S. However, President Obama recently had a memo announced that shows the President wants the U.S. to develop plans by April 2012 to have a more centralized digital repository that will be managed by the National Archives and Records Administration (even though budget cuts by the President have cut NARA jobs or programs for the coming year). Chief U.S. Government Records Officer Paul Wester "said new laws and regulations may be needed to move the process of creating a more unified electronic records system forward" (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222248/Obama_wants_feds_to_digitize_all_records). But as Computerworld, the group that conducted the interview with Wester noted, NARA has officially ended a 10-year project to create an online electronic records repository that would be accessible to all citizens. Heck, historic records aren't even available yet through any centralized database, let alone current records. If it's taken 10 years for a project to fall through, what hope under the U.S.'s current approach to electronic records management will the future citizens and government of this country have when it looks back to the 1990s-2010s? We will have no records, and our citizens will not have access to records the Constitution gives them right to due--not to cover ups or issues of government redaction--but to being unable to keep up with technology (the very technology the U.S. government promotes for archives to begin using through grants and state programs for which little funding is available). We have more money allocated for developing new technology for the military than we do for our nation's internal records access, preservation, and security.

The Dutch State Archives Digital Depot became operational in 2010, and now the nation has a means to preserve electronic records from this point forward, giving the Dutch time to catch up on preserving records in older formats/outdated electronic formats. The National Library of The Netherlands (KB) has been working with the State Archives by storing the nation's scientific and scholarly publications in the e-Depot: "Next to its national deposit collection, the e-Depot contains the digital archive of the Dutch academic institutional repositories, the Dutch web archive from 2008 onwards and the master archive of national digitisation projects" (http://www.openplanetsfoundation.org/members/national-library-netherlands). The KB's goal for their collections within the e-Depot is to move from 15 terabytes of articles as of 2008 to by 2013 having 700 terabytes. The Dutch e-Depot has become the digital storage center for electronic journal publications, and it is no wonder that most scholarly journal publishers in Britain and the Netherlands have used the Dutch State Archives to store the world's past and new electronic scholarly research.

Why has the U.S. lagged so far in their appreciation for records management digitally? Why have the Dutch moved so far ahead of the world when the U.S. basically developed the personal computer and so much of the world's technology out of Silicon Valley? One issue is that the U.S. is a relatively young nation that has not come to appreciate the importance of national and state records as other nations that have faced wars, territorial divisions, records destruction, and other issues such as the Dutch have faced. Between the 1600s and World War II, the Netherlands suffered enormously from conflicts and territorial divisions that made information about the country and its population be more vital in the national consciousness than the U.S. sees it in this country. The U.S. is losing many of their records by simple neglect, by poor security, and by a lack of focus on the benefits of information. Ironically, in the new information age, we are now worried about information loss, but only as it applies to digital information--the current information medium. The U.S. still lacks an appreciation for the preservation of past information. U.S. businesses have been the biggest contributors to this national information loss as mergers and business demands outweigh preserving identity. Companies and state agencies affect society so much, employ the great majority of U.S. citizens, and are a large part in the development of societal interactions. The companies and agencies' records shed light on these developments, but many of these records are gone now or in such a state of disrepair that rebuilding an organizational or cultural identity will lead to incomplete views r knowledge about specific portions of the U.S.'s development. It is a shame the information is being lost and seen as nice to save, but there not being enough time to go back and manage all the past records of the company or government.

I believe this to be the genius of the Dutch system: start now in preservation, no matter how inadequate due to technology changes, and be able to not have to worry 20 years from now about the time it will take to go back over the digital records. In the U.S., after having worked at a county records center and archives, the general population and even government officials do not understand or know what information is available, how to utilize it, where it came from, or how to access it. It does little good to have records digitized without context, which is what many government digitization projects are doing now: digitize this collection or agency, and put it together with other agencies' records. What the Dutch have done is state the importance of all records created within a country--whether by the government or by citizens themselves (either researchers, businessmen, etc.)--should be associated together in a structured system. These records define the nation and the people within the nation. It's also important to remember for the U.S. that if a centralized digital repository was begun today, we would not have as great of a cost to try preserving and ingesting records in old formats down the road. Even though we are in a recession, I believe the U.S. government needs to take an approach to their records like the government did during the Depression with the WPA to preserve historical information, lands, artistic accomplishments, and other such things that would give a nation suffering financially some pride in itself and the informational basis to rebuild after the troubled times.

I do not believe the U.S. government will be up to speed with the Dutch until at least 2020, by than which billions of documents will be in outdated formats, and--much like an issue I face right now at my current institution with U-matic video cassettes that document the organization's advertising approaches--the cost to transfer records further down the road greatly increases and becomes challenging as the equipment is gone. Even the National Archives of Estonia, a former Soviet Republic as of 1989, is in the middle of finishing a project for their national digital archival repository, similar to the Dutch in some ways (http://riigi.arhiiv.ee/en/digital-archive-development/&i=6). Centralized digital records depositories must be developed in the U.S. (whether centralized at the state or national level). The two closest U.S. state systems I can recall that have some centralization of their digital records are in Ohio (OhioLink) and in California (Online Archive of California). Even these, though, are not of the scale being attempted by the Dutch. If the U.S. cannot agree on metadata standards and infrastructure soon, there will be few digital records to describe or store. Although there are information professionals and digital archivists working on this issue, there is too much division in the nation's information systems to allow for a centralized digital depot right now.