Washington State Digital Archives

The Washington State Digital Archives in Cheney, Washington preserves electronic records from Washington's state and local government agencies. It opened in October 2004 and is the first state archives in the United States dedicated specifically to the preservation of electronic records.

History

The Washington State Archives began strategic planning for the Digital Archives in 2000, and planning for the physical design and technical infrastructure occurred in 2002. Construction began in January 2003.

Concurrent with construction, research began on the programmatic and technological aspects of the Digital Archives. Site visits by project team members were made to the National Archives and the Library of Congress. A strategic plan was developed that included extensive involvement of staff, executive management and external stakeholders.

In June 2004, custom development on the web interface and database design began, blending the latest technologies with traditional archival theory to create a first of its kind repository. The goal of the program was to make the historical electronic records of State and Local government agencies easily accessible to the public, from anywhere, at any time. The first records brought into the facilities care were marriage records from three pilot counties (Chelan, Snohomish and Spokane) along with the Historic Census and Naturalization records from the State Archives and State Library.

The grand opening of the facility occurred on October 4, 2004 and was attended by Washington State legislators, county officials, and archivists from throughout the United States. Among the speakers at this prestigious event were Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed and Lew Bellardo, Deputy Archivist of the United States.[1]

Some significant milestones have occurred over the years. In 2005 the staff of the digital archives worked quickly to preserve outgoing governor Gary Locke's website, an important public record, before it was replaced by the website for incoming governor Christine Gregoire.[2] Three years later, through a collaboration with Microsoft Research, the archives released a ground-breaking new feature that made it possible to keyword search audio files.[3] As of May 15, 2017, there are nearly 30,000 keyword searchable audio files on the archives website. Starting in 2007, the archives partnered with the Library of Congress on their Multi-State Preservation Consortium, an effort to spread digital archiving of state government records into other states across the country.[4]

The Washington State Digital Archives is part of the Office of the Secretary of State currently directed by Kim Wyman.

Location

The archives is located in Cheney, Washington on the campus of Eastern Washington University. The archives has extensive educational partnerships with the university including internships for students, an archive crash-course for history survey classes, and facilitated student research projects using surrogate archival collections. One student-driven project, "Treasures of the Archives," showcases a compelling series or records in the collection each month. These short bits are featured on the archives' home page.

map of Washington state showing location of Washington State Digital Archives
The Washington State Digital Archives is located in Cheney, WA--about 265 miles east of Seattle.

The archives is located on the southwest corner of EWU's campus in a two-story building that it shares with the Eastern Region Branch of the Washington State Archives, a regional archives for paper records created by local government agencies in Washington's eleven easternmost counties. The building is named for Belle Reeves, the first woman to serve as Secretary of State of Washington.[5]

Holdings and Notable Collections

When the facility opened in 2004 the Archives only held a few record series but as of April 3, 2017, the Archives has preserved 187,121,397 records, of which 65,559,111 were searchable on the Archives website. Many of these records were born digital but the Archives also preserves digitized historic paper records to provide easy access to the records to researchers around the world. Some of the Archives notable collections that can be found on the website are:

  • Washington State Birth Records pre-1907
  • Washington State Marriage Records
  • Washington State Agency Meeting Minutes
  • Washington State Historic Photographs
  • Washington State Agency Audio Recordings

See also

References

  1. ^ "Digital Archives Background and History". Washington State Digital Archives. Retrieved April 3, 2017. Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.
  2. ^ "Digital archives saves Locke's website from extinction". www.digitalarchives.wa.gov. Retrieved 2017-05-15.
  3. ^ "Digital Archives, Microsoft Research take public records access to the next level with Audio Search". www.digitalarchives.wa.gov. Retrieved 2017-05-15.
  4. ^ "Multi-State Preservation Consortium - Partners - Digital Preservation (Library of Congress)". www.digitalpreservation.gov. Retrieved 2017-05-15.
  5. ^ Glasgow, Laura. "Washington State Archives, Digital Archives". Spokane Historical. Public History program, Eastern Washington University. Retrieved 18 March 2022.

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