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Website copyright © 2002-2025 by Dennis D. McDonald. From Alexandria, Virginia I support proposal writing & management, content and business development, market research, and strategic planning. I also a practice and support cursive handwriting. My email: ddmcd@ddmcd.com. My bio: here.

Preserving History in a Digital Era: The Challenges of Municipal Archives

Preserving History in a Digital Era: The Challenges of Municipal Archives

By Dennis D. McDonald

Recently, I received a very interesting book as a gift: History of the Merced Irrigation District; Merced and Mariposa Counties, California 1919–1977, by Kenneth R. McSwain, published in 1978. This lengthy and detailed history was written by retired chief engineer and manager McSwain “…with the purpose of assembling, in one volume, a summary covering local water development for over one century.”

My interest in this book is twofold.

First, I have family members who live in Merced. I have seen firsthand how complex irrigation processes are to manage and how the area's agriculture is affected by periodic droughts and the amount of snow received by the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains and Yosemite National Park. Spend enough time around Merced and you inevitably learn how dependent our food supply is on the vagaries of fluctuating weather patterns. People who live and farm there understand the importance of water management far better than those of us who naively assume that when you turn on the tap, the water just flows.

Second, I recently completed a two-year stint as a volunteer on Alexandria, Virginia's Public Records Advisory Commission. As I read through the details of this book, this "archival experience" has given me a deep appreciation for the amount of research that went into the Merced book’s creation. The fact that records dating back to the 1800s were still available—from multiple sources—to the book’s author is impressive.

The book’s details are voluminous and impressive. It includes specifics such as miles of canal dug, inches of water flow, the cost of plots of land, and the identities of their purchasers. The events described extend back to the 1800s and highlight the massive efforts involved in developing the region’s irrigation infrastructure.

Many individuals are named in the book—managers, engineers, and landowners—but so far I have yet to see the names of laborers. This omission has me wondering: Who were the people who dug the canals, laid the underground pipes, and built the water-diverting dams? This absence reflects how history is often documented. As the saying goes, "History is written by the victors." It should come as no surprise that city, company, and executive archives mirror the social and economic divisions of their times.

This brings me back to my experience serving on Alexandria’s Public Records Advisory Commission. While my educational and professional background includes for some time working in and around libraries and their systems, I’ve had little exposure to the world of records management and municipal archives. These areas don’t receive much public attention but are critical to the functioning of local government—especially when issues of public access and the transition to electronic records are considered.

Most cities have websites, and Alexandria’s is an excellent one. However, it suffers from a common drawback: it’s built around the constantly changing organization of the city’s various departments, boards, commissions, committees, working groups, and frontline employees who interact with the public. Data and information are constantly generated by all these individuals and groups, and as a result the website can be difficult to navigate especially for someone not familiar with how the city’s operations are organized.

Over time in Alexandria’s city government, as in other cities, elaborate rules have evolved regarding which municipal records are stored, which can be destroyed, and which must remain available for public scrutiny. In the past, these records were created and stored on paper, and official city archives could document with some effort budgets, city council meetings, real estate transactions, zoning hearings, tax records, and more.

Nowadays, paper is being phased out both in conducting city business and in records storage. One might think that, since so much of today’s municipal records are already in electronic form, archiving that data for permanent retention and ensuring public access would be simplified.

However, I have found this is not always the case. In fact, having all the city’s data in electronic form may actually make archiving and public access more difficult, for several reasons, all of which carry significant cost implications. In fact, I wonder if a book like History of the Merced Irrigation District could even be written today in the same way it was in the 1970s. These challenges to archiving municipal records include factors such as the following:

  1. Data Fragmentation:  Work-related materials are often dispersed across multiple departments, systems, platforms, and devices, leading to fragmented and difficult to organize collections.

  2. Lack of Standardization: Different systems use varying and inconsistent formats and metadata standards.

  3. Access and Retrieval: Some records may become inaccessible due to lack of integration or decommissioning of systems.

  4. Technological Obsolescence: Electronic systems and formats may become obsolete over time, rendering data unreadable.

  5. Data Governance: Decentralized record management often lacks centralized oversight, which can lead to inconsistent record-keeping practices, data loss, and access difficulties.

  6. Privacy and Security: Balancing archival preservation with privacy management can complicate access to historical records, especially when personal information is mixed in with official records.

  7. Data Volume: Electronic systems can generate large quantities of data, much of which may not need to be saved. Deciding what to save can itself be a complex process.

  8. Legal and Policy Compliance: Compliance with records retention laws and regulations may not be uniformly applied across electronic systems, leading to legal and public access complications.

My experience in management consulting and project management in relation to many types of organizations and information systems leads me to believe that number 5 – Data Governance – is the single most important challenge associated with making sure that municipal electronic records are generated, stored, and managed both effectively and efficiently.

Yet anyone with experience in database management and access systems will tell you that, ideally, you need to incorporate rules and procedures right from the start at the point where records and data are generated to have any hope down the road of making sure data are managed in a way that supports effective archival and public access.

Unfortunately, coordinated governance must address the root cause of factor one – Data Fragmentation – given how the systems and processes associated with municipal record generation are rarely controlled centrally but instead are spread across different departments and systems.

In conclusion, the challenges of preserving and managing municipal records are deeply intertwined with the need for effective data governance. As History of the Merced Irrigation District demonstrates, meticulous documentation of past activities can provide invaluable insights into the development of essential systems like irrigation. However, as the transition to digital recordkeeping continues, municipalities must prioritize creating unified and standardized governance frameworks. These frameworks should address data fragmentation, ensure long-term accessibility, and balance privacy concerns. Without such attention to data governance, the ability to create comprehensive historical records—and to support informed public access—may be significantly compromised.

Copyright (c) 2025 by Dennis D. McDonald

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