Quote Originally Posted by jnantz View Post
it won’t be pretty. I feel badly for all these states whose crmp archives is all digital with no hard copy redundancy. Not my problem.
Sal and John, I think you are making the same point. The delay with HABS using born-digital – WAS – the LoC wanted to be confident that they could safely and redundantly archive the stuff. They now say the can consume/archive/protect the digital data, we have to believe them.

Now the delay to born-digital HABS is specific photo guidelines, metadata guidelines, and data transmittal systems (cannot introduce viruses into the Govt. system) then there are a thousand little things to get agreement on in general. So, solvable implementation problems – but time consuming none the less.

We may be reluctant to believe the LoC will achieve LE500+ Life Expectancy but its up to our children to sort it out because the government is all digital now and the NARA archives had to switch over in the Clinton years. No going back. Hard to believe film HABS persisted this long.

On the bright side born-digital records will all have color, and that's pretty great.

-Schaf