1. 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

2. 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

3. Who Is This?

4. 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.

5. 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.
The official administrative record which is held by a government or public agency for an indefinite period of time.
At PRIA, the answer to acceptable data loss was NONE.
This is a very high bar that has yet to be met.

6. 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.

7. 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”.

8. 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.

9. We are Analog Beings

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

12. 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

13. Preservation Silver Microfilm
Silver Halide Emulsion
Base - Acetate/Polyester

14. Microfilm Formats: Roll Film
35mm mm

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

16. Microfilm Formats: Jackets
Silver Diazo

17. Microfilm Formats: Jackets

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

19. Redox – All Silver Film

20. Cause of Redox? - Airborne Oxidants

21. Good Film Boxes

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

23. Acetate’s Enemy - Heat & Humidity
= = 2087

24. 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*
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
Longevity is the manufacturer's claim.
M-DISC
up to 1,000 years
Longevity is the manufacturer's claim. See
* If ISO standards are followed
ISO #
FUNCTION
11108:2015
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

25. Scanned from paper
Scanned from film.

26. Scanned from paper
Scanned from microfilm

27. 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?

28. 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?

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

33. 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

34. 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.

35. 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.

36. First - Preservation Begins at Capture

37. Second – Fingerprint Files (Hash/Checksum)
Baseline Doc Hash
Altered Doc Hash
244dc47c0db3cef79ec26813eabb9ec4ea0ba2be42dc38eea9c2212f0f9b5aa35cfde4462a0eadedf8e21af2d b4b6a2df0ce967ad9b3c62edb49
1c37ab7cefb69b2e35c083886a fc71a5f bb25d9c56b7f538293bb80b13fa98aa5199f91e328eda47b2c25b340a852fc8b485e6580a

38. A One Pixel Difference!
Original Image Edited Image

39. Third – Monitor

40. Fourth - Repair/Recover

41. And Finally - Report

42. The
CA Assembly Bill 2225 sponsored by Limon

43. A Kofile Technologies Company
Thank You!
Jim Harper
PFA, Inc.
A Kofile Technologies Company