To whom it may concern,
As part of my research into electronic records storage, I had the
opportunity today to make a brief visit to the GA Archives as well as the
National Archives Southeastern office, which are on the same site. I spoke
with the Assistant Director at the GA Archives and learned a bit about what
they do. The facility is South of Atlanta in the city of Morrow. It was
very interesting and impressive.
According to the brochure I picked up, the GA archives has collections of
official state records from 1754, land records, photographs, personal
papers including many from the Civil War era, over 30,000 reels of
microfilm of county church and genealogical records, books and periodicals
on county histories and genealogical records. Many images of documents are
available on computer, as well as historic photos and postcards.
In our conversation, I learned that approximately 3% of the records
generated by the state government are classified as permanent. Many are
stored at the local state agencies, with some coming to the GA
Archives. More and more, they are being generated electronically,
sometimes with no paper at all. They are initiating a pilot project to
create a digital repository to store permanent records for a small part of
the data from one agency. They're expecting to start out with about 1
Terabyte of data, stored on a RAID disk system, mirrored off site, and
backed up. I hope to learn more about it once it gets rolling. I
speculated that, once they start accepting other data from other agencies,
he could easily see 100 Terabytes of data inside of a decade. He said,
probably so, if not more. These quantities of data bring some interesting
problems to the concept of making it permanent and backed up and
accessible. From my own painful experience, I find it hard to consider any
data on a hard disk drive permanent. I've had all the data on a hard drive
vanish once due to a mistake I made. I spent the rest of the night after
quitting time restoring that computer.
You can reach the GA archives at the links below. I think they go to the
same place.
http://www.georgiaarchives.org/
http://www.sos.state.ga.us/archives/
He also told me about the Georgia Records Association. Here's a
description from their website.
The Georgia Records Association (GRA) is a professional organization
dedicated to establishing responsible Records Management practices
throughout local and state government in Georgia.
http://www.georgiarecords.org/
They have lots of neat links on their website, including one to the Atlanta
ARMA Chapter: http://www.atlantaarma.org/ .
Another resource he mentioned was the Georgia Document Management
Association. They also have several links on the site.
http://gdma.webexone.com/
Finally, he also mentioned that the Forsyth County Board Of Education is
doing some really neat things with geospacial data so they can simply point
at a map and find out what documents and resources are at each school. I
don't know if that's available to the public in any way, but I did find a
link so you can pull up a map of all their bus stops. I thought that was neat.
http://www.forsyth.k12.ga.us/forsyth/site/default.asp
http://fcsgis.forsyth.k12.ga.us/onpointgis/onpoint
I also dropped by the National Archives Southeastern Region office, which
is on the same site. I only had enough time to pick up some brochures, but
I hope to go back sometime. The facility looks very impressive.
http://www.archives.gov/southeast/
Finally, I worked for hours the other day putting up my own website related
to my company for data security. It is MAC Data Security. MAC stands for
Manage, Archive, and Conserve your data. I've added more information about
the archival grade DVD's and CD's I mentioned earlier, as well as a link to
the manufacturer and pricing information. The site is still very new, and
very much under construction.
http://macdatasecurity.com/
I hope you find this information useful. I will be out of the office for
about a week. So, feel free to reply, but it will take me a little while
to respond.
Sincerely,
Ron Frazier
------------------------------
Ron Frazier
Recordable DVD's & CD's can fail in 2-5 years. Don't let that happen to
YOUR data.
Get your GOLD Archival Grade DVD's & CD's from
http://macdatasecurity.com/ today!
http://c3energy.com/ --- http://c3energy.com/alt_energy/
http://c3energy.com/computersecurity/ --- http://c3energy.com/health/
I am an independent consultant interested in exploring ways to archive data
over long periods of time.
Ron Frazier -- P.O. Box 2284 -- Cumming, GA 30028 -- 770-205-9422
(O) -- 404-431-5472 (C)
Email: rwfrazier AT c3energy DOT com (replace the AT and DOT by hand)
List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
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