History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

[Sutter Cane]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

It's not that expensive to maintain, curate and offer the public access to archives. It's the sweetheart fancy building deals that sink budgets. I keep trying to sink this point home, and it takes a little bit to research, but it's always there. When things look amiss, there's usually a sweetheart building deal attached to an even more sweetheart financing deal. They paid more last year for the building that everything else combined. I'm sure there's some suitable space in the state that would be a lot less expensive.

I am not an architect, and I've never been involved with a building project that large, so I honestly have no idea if $40 million is an excessively large figure for a building like this. I assume that it was built with lots of excess space to accommodate future storage needs. They were also attempting to make a splashy, high-profile building. The city of Seattle tried to do that with their public library, and succeeded - they also spent $165.5 million.

I did some googling to see if I could find any other similar construction around the same time, and the only thing I could find was the Utah state archives built a new building in 2004 for $6 million. It is only 50,000 square feet, and the GA building is 200,000, but even though the building in UT is only 1/4 the size of the GA building, it was 1/6th the cost to construct. (It is also a pretty unassuming structure - I take it Utah wasn't shooting for making an architectural showplace). As for the HVAC system, well, one of the important aspects of storing these kinds of documents is keeping the humidity low. This has got to be a more expensive proposition in Georgia than it is in Utah, so I can't comment on that...

But yes, one must imagine that were the building project being started today rather than in the early 2000s while the country was in the grip of housing bubble excess, it would have been harder to justify.

I still think TECI is a good and necessary idea. Archives are just like the rest of our nation's infrastructure, lots of outdated stuff, still coasting on capital investments from the New Deal in many cases. But if such projects were to be undertaken today, the concern that we would end up with a lot of corrupt "public-private partnerships" and no-bid contracts to Halliburton and the like is very real.

[lektrode]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

I am not an architect, and I've never been involved with a building project that large, so I honestly have no idea if $40 million is an excessively large figure for a building like this. I assume that it was built with lots of excess space to accommodate future storage needs. They were also attempting to make a splashy, high-profile building. The city of Seattle tried to do that with their public library, and succeeded - they also spent $165.5 million.

I did some googling to see if I could find any other similar construction around the same time, and the only thing I could find was the Utah state archives built a new building in 2004 for $6 million. It is only 50,000 square feet, and the GA building is 200,000, but even though the building in UT is only 1/4 the size of the GA building, it was 1/6th the cost to construct. (It is also a pretty unassuming structure - I take it Utah wasn't shooting for making an architectural showplace).....

do you sense a pattern?
eye sure do....

in SEA:

http://seattletimes.com/news/local/l...ewlibrary.html

Even though it hasn't opened yet, the $165.5 million steel-and-glass building designed by renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is the rage of many art-and-architecture types. But when the doors open next Sunday, will the public feel the same?

who knows, but i can just imagine what they will be feeling when they get the bill (and or the budget cuts that curtail hours/staff/books when they cant afford to operate it)

and then look at SLC - where the politics (and budgets) tend to be more conservative:

http://www.tbcxinc.com/state_of_utah_archives.php

The two-story, $6 million Archives Building houses an Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS), which dramatically increases the efficiency of the operation. Administration, patron services, records analysis, micrographic sections and storage facilities for the permanent records collection are also found in the Archives Building. The triple-deep ASRS is capable of storing approximately 50,000 cubic feet of records and allows for 5 to 10 years of expansion.


The Archives Building includes specialized environmental systems as well as special plumbing requirements. In the micrographics and several other sensitive areas, roof drains and other water piping require secondary containment or spillage trays.


Other specialized systems required include ammonia exhaust for the Diazzo duplicators and constant volume and humidification and reheat for the high temperature / humidity room in the conservation lab.

UT, the SLC metro area in particular - may spend a LOT of money on infrastructure (and over the past 30+ years i've been going there, its EYE-POPPING whats been built) but they seem to account for it honestly, with policies that stress budgetary restraint vs building soaring steel/glass edifices, designed by famou$ architects.

whats most impressive about how SLC does things is just how much bang for the buck they seem to get, with one of the best/most functional transportation networks eye have seen anywhere in The US, immaculate neighborhoods, streets/parks/facilities etc, relatively low crime rates (one can protect oneself in UT, concealed-carry etc means you can FIGHT BACK when the thugs try to intimidate or worse)

but then... that tends to be what one gets in red/conservative states vs the others

[don]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

A book I found useful, and alarming, on the subject is Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Review excerpts:

All writers of course love the printed word, but few are those willing to start foundations in order to preserve it. Not only has noted novelist Baker (The Mezzanine; Vox; etc.) done so, he's also written a startling expos‚ of an ugly conspiracy perpetuated by the very people entrusted to preserve our history librarians. Baker started the American Newspaper Repository in 1999, when he discovered that the only existing copies of several major U.S. newspapers were going to be auctioned off by the British Library. Not only were U.S. libraries not interested, it turned out that they'd tossed their own copies years before. Why? Baker uncovered an Orwellian universe in our midst in which preservation equals destruction, and millions of tax dollars have funded and continue to fund the destruction of irreplaceable books, newspapers and other print media. The instruments of that destruction microfilm, microfiche, image readers and toxic chemicals are less to blame than the cadre of former CIA and military operatives at the Library of Congress in the 1950s who refused to acknowledge that those technologies were, in fact, inferior to preserving and storing the originals. They were more concerned with ways to (in the words of one) "extract profit and usefulness from" old books while at the same time "prevent [them] from clogging the channels of the present." Baker details these events in one horrifying chapter after another, and he doesn't mince words. One can only gasp in outraged disbelief as he describes the men and women who, while supposedly serving as responsible custodians of our history, have chosen instead to decimate it. (Publishers Weekly)

Pulling no punches, novelist Baker (Vox) is a romantic, passionate troublemaker who questions the smug assumptions of library professionals and weeps at the potential loss of an extensive, pristine run of Joseph Pulitzer's New York World. For him, the wholesale destruction of books and newspapers to the twin gods of microfilming and digitization is an issue of administrators seeking storage space not of preserving a heritage. He contends that the alarmist slogans "brittle books" and "slow fires" are intended to obscure the reality and the destruction. Throughout his book, Baker hammers away at the Orwellian notion that we must destroy books and newspapers in order, supposedly, to save them. Particularly singled out for opprobrium are University Microfilms Inc. and the Library of Congress. This extremely well-written book is not a paranoid rant. Just this past October, Werner Gundersheimer, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, said at LC's "Preserve and Protect" symposium that, amid all the smoke and fury, Baker was essentially pleading for "a last copy effort of some kind." Double Fold is the narrative of a heroic struggle: Picture Baker as "Offisa Pup" defending "Krazy Kat," of the printed word, against the villainous "Ignatz Mouse" of the library establishment all in glorious, vivid color on brittle (but unbowed) newsprint. Highly recommended. (Library Journal)

Side note: I just finished scanning 10 months of old boxing periodicals. A grinding chore on a scanner bed slightly smaller than the magazines. Cleaning them up in Photoshop, converting them to PDFs - lots of time for the non-professional archivist.

[lektrode]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

A book I found useful, and alarming, on the subject is Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Review excerpts:... Throughout his book, Baker hammers away at the Orwellian notion that we must destroy books and newspapers in order, supposedly, to save them. Particularly singled out for opprobrium are University Microfilms Inc. and the Library of Congress. This extremely well-written book is not a paranoid rant. ...

well maybe not a paranoid rant, but just an argument over semantics?
as in: whats more important, the preservation of the paper, or whats printed upon it?

increasingly scarce resources demand modern solutions.
maintaining millions/billions of sheets of paper, and hundreds of thousands of sqft of warehouses (esp multi-hundred million-dollar world renowned archectect-designed steel/glass edifices, typically with some politicians name on em), staffed by expensive pro archivists would seem to be more political than practical??

and we can no longer afford the political.

Side note: I just finished scanning 10 months of old boxing periodicals. A grinding chore on a scanner bed slightly smaller than the magazines. Cleaning them up in Photoshop, converting them to PDFs - lots of time for the non-professional archivist.

but am assuming it was worth the effort?
just like it will be worth the effort (pain for some) to reconfigure how archives are built/maintained at .gov levels.
the private sector has certainly done it (just think what banks alone have done)

when will the .gov?

[don]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

but am assuming it was worth the effort?

Absolutely (masochism not being one of my strong suits). These mags are in extremely short supply. I distributed burned CD copies to several fellow boxing historians - one emailed me he was perusing them at 2AM.

My experience with digitally archived newspapers has been pretty good, if the scanning, viewing equipment and printing (hard copy or digital) is up to snuff. Having the entire newspaper copied is by far the best format. The larger socio-political context adds real depth to the work.

[lektrode]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

i've started to keep as many biz records as possible in pdf, printing as little as possible - but havent quite got to the point of scanning material receipts - altho i will likely start doing that after this year - if for no other reason than the volume of them has plummeted (along with revenue)

[Sutter Cane]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

Side note: I just finished scanning 10 months of old boxing periodicals. A grinding chore on a scanner bed slightly smaller than the magazines. Cleaning them up in Photoshop, converting them to PDFs - lots of time for the non-professional archivist.

It is a really time-consuming process, professional or not. You can't really appreciate how much so until you attempt it. Now, picture doing the same for the contents of a large archive, and then managing the digital copies. A monumental undertaking.

Yet people just assume that everything is already available online!

[don]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

It is a really time-consuming process, professional or not. You can't really appreciate how much so until you attempt it. Now, picture doing the same for the contents of a large archive, and then managing the digital copies. A monumental undertaking.

Yet people just assume that everything is already available online!

They've been herded in that direction. One of Baker's fears - which has already happened with the military - is that a digital archive will become obsolete and unrecoverable, meanwhile the old school hard-copies have been destroyed.

[lektrode]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

...One of Baker's fears - which has already happened with the military - is that a digital archive will become obsolete and unrecoverable, meanwhile the old school hard-copies have been destroyed.

short of an EMP blast-wipeout, that seems somewhat unlikely.
but thats a fair point.
wonder what the backup plan for 'lektronic storage is?
in the ole daze of tape-type media, or even diskdrives, i'd be a bit more nervous - but with 'solid state drives' ?
would seem that the 'hardcopy afficionados' are merely nostalgic...
add to this the implication of having to cut staff due to what need for warm bodies in an archive warehouse when the records go from the keyboard/screen to disk (or SSD)?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

They've been herded in that direction. One of Baker's fears - which has already happened with the military - is that a digital archive will become obsolete and unrecoverable, meanwhile the old school hard-copies have been destroyed.

I saw that personally a few years back. Our company manufactured high performance pan-and-tilt closed-circuit security cameras, many were used at defense sites.
Some contracts required the firmware and software be retained for 30 years.

We had a walk-in vault containing paper tapes, large-format floppy disks, reel tapes, and removable hard disks, all useless.
No readers available, obsolete digital formats; non-existent operating systems.

Perhaps archaeologists in the far future will wonder why the records all blinked out in the 21st century.
They won't understand that we decided to write our records in the dust and just let them blow away...

[mfyahya]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

I saw that personally a few years back. Our company manufactured high performance pan-and-tilt closed-circuit security cameras, many were used at defense sites.
Some contracts required the firmware and software be retained for 30 years.

We had a walk-in vault containing paper tapes, large-format floppy disks, reel tapes, and removable hard disks, all useless.
No readers available, obsolete digital formats; non-existent operating systems.

Perhaps archaeologists in the far future will wonder why the records all blinked out in the 21st century.
They won't understand that we decided to write our records in the dust and just let them blow away...

If the data was important, they should have spent some effort to maintain it, and not lock it up and forget it. A review every 5 years or so to evaluate if physical storage and data formats need to be migrated would be sufficient. PDF is about 20 years old now, and since its specification is open, I'm reasonably confident it will still be readable another 20 years from now.

I've used my share of floppy disks and tapes, and everything that was useful is still accessible, with multiple remote backups of the important stuff. This is really simple to do nowadays.

Storage can be outsourced to some sort of public equivalent of Amazon S3 that has geographically (or even politically) distributed mirrors.
Private organizations such as archive.org could maintain mirrors and cryptographic hashes as well which somewhat addresses the malleability problem of digital documents.

OCR can be done in addition to scanning the docs as an image. Storage is cheap.

And it doesn't have to be 100% digital. A cost trade off can be made to keep more valuable material in paper form as well.

[don]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

Acrobat is up to version X. If I send copy to one of my editors in that format he has problems at the printers. I have to back it into a previous format back down the line a few generations - this in a platform that prides itself on its universality.

[mfyahya]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

If you have more to scan, you can pick up some tips here.

[dcarrigg]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

And yet there is money to be made from obsoleteness. Just made a quick $30k on the side selling old Okidata dot matrix printers to manufacturing companies who needed them simply because they work with their existing systems. $2k/pop for an old dot matrix printer.

Goes to show you...

[don]

Re: History? Eh, who needs it!: Georgia Closes State Archives

who needed them simply because they work with their existing systems

Ah, yes . . .