Ars Technica website adds its own insights into an earlier New York Times report that the National Archives and Records Administration may have a hard time carrying out its duty to archive the many records of the Bush Administration. The sheer volume of messages and other documents, the ongoing insistence of Vice President Cheney that he is sole arbitor of what can be in the public history and what cannot and (we add this as an editorial note) the way-understaffed workforce at NARA all add to the long lead time before the public can really get to Bush 43’s records. But there is another wrinkle: even the index may be inscrutible. The problem is that it is kept in an older document storage software running on Oracle. And photos are in a proprietary program. Perhaps NARA, with its awesome expertise, will eventually break through–but in what time period and at what cost?
The takeaway: electronic media are not yet up to the task of keeping official records intact and accessible. So far: it’s still all about paper.