So Much E-Mail, So Little Space

When Bill Clinton hands over the presidential reins to George W. Bush on Saturday, the National Archives will be inundated with every e-mail written during the last eight years by everyone from the president down to the lowliest White House aide. Besides offering researchers all kinds of titillating possibilities (Monica, Whitewater, Travelgate, etc.), it will also be the biggest digital avalanche ever. A staggering 40 million e-mails will wind up at the National Archives. And that’s just the beginning.

The federal repository, sometimes referred to as the nation’s attic, also will become the custodian of millions of other electronic documents, such as all presidential correspondence. The total will be more by far than the archives has received in its history. And by law, historically valuable documents have to be saved.

The dilemma facing the suburban Maryland-based National Archives and Records Administration--the archives’ formal name-- is that it doesn’t yet have the ability to handle the expected volume, or even come close.

On top of that, what’s being produced by White House computers is nothing compared with the traffic spewing from other federal agencies.

“It’s just a huge problem,” said Ken Thibodeau, the archives’ director of electronic programs.

The stodgy National Archives is much better prepared to deal with musty papers and filing cabinets--the staple of government bureaucracy--than gigabytes of computer memory. The archives administration houses and displays such notable documents as the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It’s also a place where millions of photos, films and maps are stored, not to mention more than 4 billion pieces of paper ranging from U.S. Supreme Court rulings to mind-numbing trade data.

Opened in 1935 on Pennsylvania Avenue, the National Archives soon became so crowded that its inner courtyard had to be filled to provide more storage space. In 1993, a new building--dubbed Archive II--roughly half the size of the Pentagon, and the government’s third-largest building (after the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C.)--was opened in suburban College Park, Md.

But Archive II is filling rapidly. Professional archivists and historians fear that unless a way is developed to store and preserve the digital mountains of data, a great deal of historical record will be lost.

“What people have written among themselves has been crucial to understanding the tenor of the times,” said archivist Susan Lukesh of Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. “I wouldn’t want to be an archeologist of this period because of all the things we’re leaving behind.”

Complicating matters, much data already stored cannot be read because the hardware is hopelessly antiquated or, worse, nonexistent. And even computerized documents that can be stored and read may have a limited shelf life--as few as 10 years by some estimates--before becoming obsolete because of the rapid advances in computer technology.

While paper was the staple of earlier times, nowadays most everyone is doing business on computers. Peter Smails, an executive with Smart Storage, a commercial archiving business catering to companies with large data storage needs, said a third of all corporate dealings are done via e-mail.

“Businesses run on e-mail,” he said. “And storage-growth requirements are growing anywhere from 80% to 150% a year.”

That is true in government as well. In the last eight years of the Clinton administration, electronic communication has gone from being something of an oddity to an absolute necessity.

And retrieving what was written electronically also has become a part of our modern lore. (Over the years, lawsuits have established that federal data such as e-mail are official records and can’t be eliminated by simply pushing a computer’s delete button.) Three presidential administrations--those of Reagan, Bush and Clinton--have tried unsuccessfully to keep the contents of e-mail closed to the public. E-mail, for instance, played a prominent role in the investigation into Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, as well as investigations into White House fund-raising.

And e-mail was used to uncover the details of the 1986 Iran-Contra affair, in which Col. Oliver North and his superiors schemed to sell arms to Iran and use the money to aid Nicaraguan Contras. Many details of the plan were stored in the electronic messaging system. Though those messages were deleted, White House staffers saved backup tapes that were later key in the investigation of the scandal.

On Jan. 19, 1989--the final day of the Reagan administration--the National Security Archive, the world’s largest nongovernmental library of declassified documents, filed suit to ensure that all White House electronic mail and records systems would be subject to archival review. The National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, was founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars as a centralized repository for information gleaned under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

As the Reagan administration came to an end, the White House planned to delete all messages in its system, treating them more as phone conversations than matters of historical record. Years of courtroom battling have followed, and continue even as Clinton leaves the White House.

Cutting a Deal With Archivist

There was high drama, too, when George Bush left office after one term. “The Bush people flipped out, to put it mildly,” said Tom Blanton, executive director of National Security Archive, which boasts the largest collection of national security information outside the federal government.

The Bush administration cut a deal with the then-national archivist, Don Wilson, who gave the outgoing president exclusive legal control over his e-mail. (Wilson went on to become the archivist for the Bush presidential library in Texas.) On Jan. 19, 1993, the night before Bill Clinton was inaugurated, Wilson directed his staff to remove hard drives and tapes from White House computers. Lawyers for the National Security Archive quickly filed suit, knowing that presidential e-mails would be lost forever if something wasn’t done immediately in the courts. “We knew we’d caught them doing the wrong thing,” said Blanton. “We were right, and we knew we were right.”

Later, some on the archives staff would file an internal memo protesting the “midnight ride” in which computer tapes and hard drives were loaded into cardboard boxes for Bush’s personal use.

Four years later, when archivists began to look at hard drives from the Bush-era computers, they were forced to buy old computers in order to read the material. Newer ones wouldn’t work.

With all the challenges facing the National Archives, there is a measure of hope on the horizon. Congress has doled out $130 million to help solve the digital dilemma.

Working with, among others, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, a research unit of UC San Diego that is at the forefront of high-performance computing and networking technology, the archives administration is seeking to sort through the electronic mess. The hope is that a system can be devised that would be able to read hundreds of formats, from punch cards to CD-ROMs.

“You want to look for a one-size-fits-all way of preserving documents,” said Lewis J. Bellardo, deputy archivist of the United States. “We’re making dramatic progress.”

The view from outside the archives also is hopeful, though cautionary. Anne J. Gilliland-Swetland, an assistant professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, said the archives are “light years ahead of where they were four years ago.”

Perhaps. But the road ahead remains daunting and, as Gilliland-Swetland points out, it may be easier now to examine the documents of Jefferson and Adams than those of Clinton and Bush.

Digital Documents a Growing Problem

Meanwhile, the wave of documents continues to mount. The U.S. State Department, for instance, has 25 million electronic diplomatic cables that must find a home in the archives. The Department of Defense is in the process of digitizing its enormous personnel records. The vast majority of the federal bureaucracy is still saving things the old way--by making copies and filing them.

Michael Tankersley, a lawyer for the Washington-based Public Citizen Litigation Group and an electronic data expert, said that while work with the supercomputer experts will be helpful, it doesn’t address the archives’ responsibility to set strict standards and make other government bodies toe the line. He said that although the archives sets the rules about what to save and what to toss, it has played too passive a role.

“Part of the archives’ central duty is to make the decision about which records are important, and devote the resources to preserve them,” he said. “While the supercomputer is useful, it’s not addressing the key mission, which is to make sure government records are being managed appropriately.”

Thibodeau, for one, envisions a time when all data stored electronically will be available at the touch of a button. Blanton says that history will be better for the electronic data, particularly the e-mails.

“With e-mail we’re getting a vastly expanded historical record and a level of quicker governmental accountability,” he said. “We started losing history with the advent of the telephone. Conversations that had taken place through correspondence now took place over the phone and were lost in the ether. E-mail has brought us to a level of correspondence that Jefferson and Adams could never dream up. And if we are just pro-active, those messages will be savable, searchable and retrievable for history.”