I am not sure Vermont “gets it.”

My Blog entry this week is from a news article in the April 19th edition of Vermont’s Rutland Herald. Deb Markowitz, Secretary of State writes:

“Last year my office took over responsibility for the public records division of state government, consolidating this department with the State Archives. We undertook a comprehensive and critical examination of all the programs of that division and discovered that tax dollars had been paying for a department that performed work that was obsolete. In our digital age, it is rarely necessary to microfilm records for storage or protection. By eliminating that department, we are saving the state hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and we did it without compromising access to, and the maintenance and preservation of our government records.”

This pronouncement by Vermont’s Secretary of State leaves me bewildered making the assumptions she makes, she doesn’t “get it.”

This thought process as it relates to microfilm’s costs and so called obsolescence is more wide spread than we think. Microfilm as I have stated in earlier posts, is about the ONLY true way to “preserve” important documents. Electronic forms of “archiving” information is just that - archiving. What the good Secretary doesnt understand is that elecronic forms of archiving can become corrupt which renders the information contained, unusable and gone forever. Have you ever lost a digital file or a document and couldnt retrieve it? Imagine what would happen to important State of Vermont documents if those files were to become corrupt in any way. They would be gone, unretrievable and only could hope that the redundency of those files, works.

Don’t get caught thinking that the digital age is the perfect solution to costs and preservation of information. Digital saving of documents is a great avenue for ease of access to those documents and records, but there needs to be a more permanent history that one can have as a fail-safe for important documents. Cost cutting mentality endangers that history.

Just my take for what it’s worth.