From the Executive Director

People know PHMC as an institution that preserves the past, but one of our attributes that I am most proud of is how forward-looking we are. After all, we are in “the forever business,” so it is our duty to embrace new technologies to ensure proper care and stewardship of our collective heritage.

While our new archives building has received a lot of (well-deserved) attention, other aspects of our preservation work are less visible. That is certainly the case for electronic records.

The Pennsylvania State Archives is currently designing a Digital Archives and Digital Records Center (DADRC) to ensure we can care for electronic records just as effectively as we care for paper records.

At present, the State Archives holds 250 million records that PHMC stewards in perpetuity, and the State Records Center holds another 750 million state government records that need to be kept, in accordance with retention schedules, up to 100 years.

As you would expect, more and more documents are being created and saved in electronic form. Imagine going to the State Archives in 2074 to retrieve a Word document about how the state responded to the pandemic. Will electronic storage media like flash drives and external hard drives still work, or will they have gone the way of the floppy disk? And will currently ubiquitous software programs such as Microsoft Word even exist as a platform, or (despite Bill Gates’ current success) will it have become obsolete, like WordPerfect?

While we could easily hand you a paper record 50 years from now, it is much harder to guarantee that we can do that with an electronic record.

Once it becomes operational, DADRC will preserve records in the cloud in multiple locations while constantly performing preservation actions on them. Documents will be scanned continuously to make sure that they maintain the integrity of their original creation, while accommodating software updates to ensure that they can be opened and read forever.

With a launch date of early 2025, we will be breaking new ground as one of the first Digital Archives and the first Digital Records Center in the nation. This is just one of many ways that PHMC is looking forward and adapting to ensure that these important records remain available to future generations of Pennsylvanians.

Andrea Lowery
Executive Director, PHMC