Archives not up to digital preservation.

Most academic institutions lack the resources to establish and maintain their electronic records, according to a study by Tufts University and Yale University Library, "Fedora and the Preservation of University Records Project."

Funded by the U.S. National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Tufts-Yale Project investigated three areas: requirements for trustworthy record-keeping systems and preservation activities; ingesting records into a preservation system; and maintaining records in a preservation system.

The study reveals that today's world is challenging for archivists in any institution or organization.

For example, the study states that the nature of the modern office--with its "hybrid paper/electronic systems, digital environments created to support the manipulations and repurposing of data at the expense of record-keeping, obsolescence of hardware and software, media decay, the proprietary and idiosyncratic nature of applications," and other issues--makes it difficult for archivists to provide for the long-term preservation of authentic e-records and maintain the accountability of the organizations and operations that those records are supposed to document.

This reality results in institutions creating and maintaining e-records that they cannot automatically trust and depend on in the same way that they can traditional paper records, the Tufts-Yale Project concludes.

In addition, long-term preservation of archival university records is difficult and costly. Significant hardware, software, network, and personnel are needed for simply maintaining e-records. And, according to the study, many--if not most--university archives and academic institutions (along with archives and institutions in other industries) that are responsible for preserving e-records simply do not have the resources to establish and sustain their own trustworthy, scalable, digital preservation program.

The project concludes that the archival community must change its traditional skill set, which would "involve a shift in the focus of archival work away from arrangement and description or processing of records and towards systems analysis and business process analysis."

The entire Tufts-Yale Project report is available at http://dca.tufts.edu/features/ nhprc/reports/index.html.