Among pictorial documents in jeopardy are images from the New Deal, the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar years. Our audio and visual records contain historical sights and sounds that bring the 20th century alive. Preserving such audio-visual material is simple, however, compared to the problems posed by the even newer information technologies of our time. As the government s record keeper, NARA faces increasingly enormous quantities of records generated with computer technology, such as word-processing documents, automated databases, and electronic mail. As with paper records, NARA must work with federal agencies in appraising the value of such records and we must approve decisions on how long each body of records should be kept, including which ones warrant preservation in the National Archives.
Electronic records pose the biggest challenge to record keeping ever.
Over the past quarter-century, the National Archives has taken in approximately 90,000 files of electronic records, which were a minute fraction of all such records generated even in that time. That is more than ten times as much from just one agency, in one year, as the National Archives has received from the entire government in a quarter-century. NARA preserves and provides access to paper dispatches that generals sent and received in conducting the Civil War more than a hundred years ago. And given the rate of software and hardware obsolescence, maintaining original systems on which to read such records is neither technically nor economically feasible. The National Archives was created in 1934 in part because fires in government offices over the years had destroyed so many documents, including the census records of 1890.