Purpose & Analysis

       The transition from paper records to born-digital records has created new problems for the archivists whose mantra has been "Provenance, Original Order, and Respect des Fonds". The National Archives and Records Administration which once dealt with a backlog of paper records, is now having to come to terms with the more than 40 million e-mail messages from Clinton's eight years in office.  Even organizations that do not have the scope of NARA have to develop strategies for preserving important electronic records, for legal as well as historical reasons. Both Bearman and Grimard are interested in, and write about the difficulties in archiving electronic records.
       Bearman is most concerned with the threats to the authenticity of electronic records. He recognizes two issues that face organizations- "For documents or records that are not to be kept, how to ensure that the decision to dispose reflects organizational policy; and For records being kept, how to ensure that the records carry metadata reflecting their content, context, and structure adequate to their authenticity and long-term preservation" (2006, p. 29). An organization that needs to use electronic documentation as evidence in the future will need to implement information systems that allow users to perform their daily functions, while also housing recordkeeping systems that store "time-bound, inviolable, and redundant records" (p. 31). Bearman's article clearly identifies the points when records are most at risk in an attempt to alert records managers about these moments, and to offer some strategies for successful electronic archives management.
       Grimard's article focuses on the fragility of electronic records, and he advocates "organized measures aimed at stabilizing electronic information, protecting its essential stability from harm, and if necessary, restoring its stability" (2005, p. 156). Grimard advocates preserving the message, even if the document or particular system used to give the information its form becomes obsolete. He notes that this is not a position that all archivists take. Preservation of the message will necessitate the migration of records to new media, a process that Grimard admits "will have to be repeated over and over" (p. 165).  The article does a good job in highlighting the ephemeral nature of electronic information, and in increasing archivists' awareness that something will need to be done to preserve the message. Grimard is straightforward about the costs (financially and in man-power) of continually migrating data. However, he doesn't deal with the fact that it will be impossible to migrate all of the enormous amount of future electronic information. Some guidelines on what to preserve, and what information we will have to orphan would have been helpful.