CityState: Reporter
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they ask, when you can just scan it?
“But even if you did digitize it all, it’s
not a simple solution,” she says. Scanning
millions of pages is costly and there are
preservation standards for digital materi-
als to ensure they are preserved in formats
that can be carried forward into ones that
maybe haven’t been created yet.
Digital preservation is about access and
does not always replace physical preser-
vation, says C. Morgan Grefe, executive
director of the Rhode Island Historical
Society. For example, the letters of Roger
Williams, on paper that bear his hand and
350-year-old ink, are historical artifacts
in their own right that tell us more about
that writer and that environment than
just the words on the page.
“It’s about the materiality of history,”
she says. And you can’t test a digital copy
to understand environmental changes.
“There’s a lot of history embedded in the
physicality of documents.”
It took fifteen years of lobbying before
Washington state legislators approved a
plan in May to replace its 1962 archives
facility — an underground concrete bunker
— with a new $108-million building, says
Washington State archivist Steve Excell.
The facility had trees on the roof and water
in the walls. There was one fire vault, but
no fire sprinklers or room for more records.
Archivists endured many nail-biters involv-
ing electrical shorts and floods.
“Man, oh man, it’s stressful knowing
you have records at risk,” Excell says.
Rhode Island’s archives were once stored
in the basement and the sub-basement of
the State House. Some records were kept
across the street in the basement of the
Veterans Memorial Auditorium, where, on
a Thursday afternoon in June 1989, an
arsonist set four fires. The blaze ignited
1,000 boxes and much suspicion over the
perpetrator’s motives. Whoever it was knew
the basement’s layout, investigators said,
and the casualties included expense vouch-
ers from the state witness protection fund.
The mysterious arson was never solved.
But it prompted the General Assembly to
pass a law officially creating the state
archives, under the purview of the Secretary
of State. Then-Secretary of State Kathleen
Connell promptly moved the records to
Westminster Street, where at least there
were some climate controls. But water
became the new face of the enemy. The build-