The City of New York, like many of the original Dutch, English, French and Spanish colonies in the new world, retains land title and other legal and administrative records dating to the mid-17th century (1654).

The report summarising the purchase of the island of Manhattan by the Dutch is in the Dutch National Archives.

The Vatican Archives contains records back to the early Christian era.

A recently-examined palimpsest (the "Archimedes palimpsest"--see http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/) contains copies of 2 treatises by the greatest mathematician of the ancient Greek world.

There are vast quantities of legal and administrative records from the ancient Middle East (3rd millenium BCE to 1st millenium BCE--that's 5,000 years to 3,000 years ago).

And while I do not underestimate the achievement of Champollion and his peers in deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic, that achievement has since been surpassed by other scholars who have deciphered languages for which no Rosetta stone existed.

Are these examples of all the records considered "permanent" at the time they were used? No. But they are not nothing!

If, OTOH, you had contemporary electronic records in mind, then I will say your 300-year timeline is grossly-optimistic. These are likely to be lost, or unusable at any reasonable cost, within a few decades rather than centuries.

Note to Peter Kurilecz:  I did not delete the previous message because I saw no way to adequately summarise it.

Best regards,

Fred Grevin
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----- Original Message -----
From: Records Management Program <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wed Jan 27 17:23:28 2010
Subject: Re: [RM] NOW Permanent 300 years/WAS: Records Management Myths?

I don't like the term "permanent" because of what non-RIM employees think it may mean. When I have asked what it means the answers I have heard included, "oh I'm sure it's 100 years or more, 75 years, or my favorite "a very long time". Once you get away from the records professionals, the term becomes very subjective.

Dwight WALLIS wrote:
It's also notable that
records often become artifacts because of age, regardless of their content. For me that is the core of the issue. Actuaries can project how long the average person is expected to live based on various factors. I recall the IRS reasoning for mandatory withdraws from Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) had to begin at age 70.5 because they project virtually everyone is dead by the time they reach 100 years of age. Can the same principle be used for records/information?

The question that I have been trying to answer: Given good care and diligence, HOW LONG can a record or the information that record contains be expected to "live" in a reliable state before the only instances left are considered artifacts, fragments, or curiosities? I am not going to get into what type of records this should cover or why they should be kept, but assume it will be a few series of records with limited volume.

The theory I have at this point is 300 years. How did I come up with that time period?
First, after 300 years time the content of the information itself can be difficult to interpret as the result of cultural/language changes.

Second, after 300 years even with great care and diligence, critical parts will have been lost. The records may still exist but indexes, appendices, and other finding aids are no longer available.

Third, independent factors such as natural disasters, wars, negligent/willful/accidental destruction, and pandemics are very likely to have affected/destroyed most records collections and/or the people who can interpret those records. For the records to be considered valuable, someone must still be around who understands the content of the records and is aware of their existence.

If you review historic events and timelines, it's very unusual for any civilization/nation/culture to go more than 300 years without experiencing some catastrophic event that causes great destruction to most if not all of the central knowledge stores of its past. My theory assumes that after 300 years the original records and often the detailed information they contained have disappeared or been destroyed. In effect, the majority of records are expected to have "died off" after 300 years.

Any thoughts?

Rob Seibolt
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Senior Records Analyst
Midwest Research Institute, Kansas City, MO
http://www.mriresearch.org/



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