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Washington State Digital Archives Project Expands

Storage area network increase archive capacity

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- GlassHouse Technologies, is providing consulting services to the Washington State Digital Archives Project, the first state digital archives in the United States.

The consulting includes a feasibility analysis of three key components of the Digital Archives project: storage area networks; converting from legacy software and data; and data archiving. Consultants are assessing the feasibility of a variety of storage, data conversion and archiving technologies for the project, as well as making recommendations, providing preliminary design parameters, documenting recommendations and best practices, and providing proof-of-concept testing via the company's storage interoperability lab services.

The Washington State Digital Archives project is an effort to capture and digitize state and local government electronic records, preserving a comprehensive record of the state's history.

Spearheaded by the Office of the Secretary of State Archives and Records Management Division, the project has as its goal the transfer of the recorded history of the state into a single, widely available digital repository. Washington broke ground on the building that will house the Digital Archives in April 2003.

Ultimately, the digital archives will hold 800 terabytes of information, the equivalent of 200 billion pages of text. (200 billion pages of text would run the length of a football field and stack 270 feet high.) The new Digital Archives building, currently being constructed on the campus of Eastern Washington University, in Cheney, Wash., is scheduled to open in 2004.
Miriam Jones is a former chief copy editor of Government Technology, Governing, Public CIO and Emergency Management magazines.