A Kofile Technologies Company Preserving Permanent Records – Have We Bitten Off More Than We Can Chew? IGO Annual Conference July 19, 2018 Jim Harper PFA, Inc. A Kofile Technologies Company

Who Am I? Owned a company that specialized in converting real property records. Worked with recording offices across the country for 44 years. Have experience with historical paper, microfilm and electronic data. Given records preservation a lot of thought and research. Involved myself with other professional organizations with similar issues and goals. NARA, LOC, NDSA, CoSA, NAGARA

Who Is This?

Agenda Custodial responsibility for maintaining the existence & authenticity of land records. Past and current practices to meet that responsibility. How have we done in this public & private partnership? What does the future of records preservation look like.

What’s Your Acceptable Level of Data Loss? Assumption: Real Property documents are considered to be permanent records in all recording jurisdictions. What does permanent mean? Documents which retains their legal, historical and administrative value without any time frame. http://thelawdictionary.org/permanent-record/ The official administrative record which is held by a government or public agency for an indefinite period of time. https://dictionary.thelaw.com/permanent-record/ At PRIA, the answer to acceptable data loss was NONE. This is a very high bar that has yet to be met.

What’s Wrong With What We’re Doing? That depends on what you’re doing (or not doing). Should be doing: Keeping your book collection in good condition. Taking care of your historical microfilm. Creating preservation microfilm from you daily recordings. Being sure that your IT staff is performing routine backups of your electronic data. Backup is not preservation process All of these formats are considered to be “layers of insurance” against data loss.

And Should Be Doing… To insure that a document collections are complete, certain practices are necessary: Inventory: You need to know what you have, what it contains, and where it is. Assess: You need to know what condition they are in. Organize: You need to figure out what is trustworthy and worth keeping based on your preservation process and expectations. Repair: You need to fix the problems you find. Learning from past experience. Embracing the idea of “layers of insurance”.

What are “Layers of Insurance”? The diverse but logical layers Existing book collection – no technology but cumbersome relatively slow. Silver microfilm collection – low technology but reliable. Electronic data – high technology but convenient. To be reliable, the content on forms of media need to be monitored.

We are Analog Beings

Historical Books These need to be cared for before it’s too late!

Microfilm Formats These formats are all considered to be microfilm. The difference is how the raw stock is sliced and diced. This picture shows: Microfiche – left Aperture cards – center 35mm & 16mm roll film - right

Preservation Silver Microfilm Silver Halide Emulsion Base - Acetate/Polyester

Microfilm Formats: Roll Film 35mm 16mm

Microfilm Formats: COM Computer Output Microfilm – Index Data Silver – Archival Diazo – Not Archival

Microfilm Formats: Jackets Silver Diazo

Microfilm Formats: Jackets

Microfilm Formats: Aperture Cards Silver Diazo Unlikely that either are archival!

Redox – All Silver Film

Cause of Redox? - Airborne Oxidants

Good Film Boxes

Vinegar Syndrome – All Acetate Base Film LE 100 years Solutions – Duplicate onto polyester film or create new film from books

Acetate’s Enemy - Heat & Humidity 1985 + 30 = 2015 1985 + 102 = 2087

Media Longevity Summary MEDIA TYPE Life Expectancy (LE) Rating WEBSITE COMMENTS Paper 100+ years*   Applies only to "permanent" and "archival" paper only. Silver Acetate Microfilm 100 years* Subject to the ISO standards below. Manufacturing stopped in late 1980s. Acetate film is subject to both Redox & Vinegar Syndrome. Redox solution: Brown Tone film to stop existing Redox and prevent new Redox. Vingar Syndrome solution: Duplicate acetate film to silver polyester base film. Silver Polysester Microfilm 500 years* http://www.epminc.com/ Subject to the following ISO standards below. Polyester film is subject to Redox. Redox solution is to Brown Tone film to stop any existing Redox and prevent new Redox. MAM-A CD & DVD up to 300 years http://www.mam-a.com/ Longevity is the manufacturer's claim. M-DISC up to 1,000 years http://www.mdisc.com/ Longevity is the manufacturer's claim. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC * If ISO standards are followed ISO # FUNCTION 11108:2015 www.iso.org Archival Paper - Requirements for Permanence and Durability Contains requirements for unprinted archival paper intended for documents and publications required for permanent retention and frequent use. For these purposes paper of high performance and high durability is required. 18917:1999 Test for Residual Fixer Content 18902:2013 Rules for Storage Boxes 18915:2000 Test for Proper Brown Toning 18911:2010 Storage Practices

Scanned from paper Scanned from film.

Scanned from paper Scanned from microfilm

Analog Preservation Paper and film have been pretty resilient preservation media. Simple technologies that are familiar to us. They speak to us in ways our analog senses can perceive. They were used for both access and storage so they were mission critical. Yet… their care was frequently postponed or ignored. If maintaining relatively simple & very important formats like paper and film are this difficult, what makes us think we’ll do better with digital data? I know, the answer is money, what’s the question?

A New Paradigm Gone are the days of blind trust. The credibility of things we took for granted are being called into question. Photoshop, Internet, Virtual Reality, Social Media 1s & 0s that make electronic information can be manipulated. If we can no longer trust our senses, how can we prove something is authentic?

Causes of Data Corruption Source: “2017 Cost of Data Breach Study” Ponemon Institute, June 2017

PRIA ePreservation Workgroup Electronic data has similar degradation problems to previous formats. Media damage from use – Disk flexing/torn pages/torn film. Media oxidation – “Bit Rot”/moldy pages/ink fading/film redox/vinegar syndrome. Human error – Accidental file deletion/ripped out page/deleted wrong image editing film. Electronic data is more vulnerable to: Outside hacking Data manipulation inside or outside Inadvertent file overwriting

IT Takes Care of My Data! Unlikely… There job is your monitor your system. The condition of the data is your responsibility. Standard backup is intended to capture the most recent additions to your system. Backup media is recycled so older data is overwritten. If a file has changed on your system, the backup will reflect the change not the original file.

So What Do I Do! Embrace the idea of Layers of Insurance Paper and microfilm are not redundant, they are strategically complimentary. They need to be taken care of to be reliable and effective. Electronic data can be an effective layer too. If certain principles and procedures are implemented.

First - Preservation Begins at Capture

Second – Fingerprint Files (Hash/Checksum) Baseline Doc Hash Altered Doc Hash 244dc47c0db3cef79ec26813eabb9ec4ea0ba2be42dc38eea9c2212f0f9b5aa35cfde4462a0eadedf8e21af2d687830758500b4b6a2df0ce967ad9b3c62edb49 1c37ab7cefb69b2e35c083886a55377815fc71a5f3974327bb25d9c56b7f538293bb80b13fa98aa5199f91e328eda47b2c25b340a852fc8b485e6580a5091103

A One Pixel Difference! Original Image Edited Image

Third – Monitor

Fourth - Repair/Recover

And Finally - Report

The CA Assembly Bill 2225 sponsored by Limon

A Kofile Technologies Company Thank You! Jim Harper PFA, Inc. A Kofile Technologies Company jharper@pfainc.com 800-429-8200