Preserving the Record

The article last week regarding Judge Michael Marcus and his website, smartsentencing.com got me thinking about one of the court’s most important duties, preserving the record.  I share my list of strategies and options below.

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Archiving Web Sites.

I asked our NCSC Librarian, Dana Deseck-Piazzon if there was a way to archive Judge Marcus’ website, smartsentencing.com?  She was able to save it on “The Internet Archive Wayback Machine” at archive.org.  I have also used that service in the past to save earlier E-Courts conference websites.  While this may not be sufficient for our court or legal systems, it may be worthwhile for ancillary projects.  The snapshot of Smart Sentencing on archive.org is at:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170821204122/http://smartsentencing.com/whatwrks.html

Websites Cited in Ninth Circuit Opinions Web References

The US Courts for the Ninth Circuit library saves the URL references cited in their court opinions.

They explain that “(b)cause some URLs cited in court opinions may change over time or disappear altogether, this project attempts to capture, as closely as possible, what the court was referencing at the time the opinion was released. Using the URL cited in the opinion, the Ninth Circuit Library saves a copy of the cited material as a PDF file and adds a watermark to denote the document's archived status. The Library does not attempt to determine if any changes have been made to the website between the date the court last visited the site and the date the Library archived it.”

Since 2016 they are saving the referenced website pages as PDF’s on their PACER system.

But they do provide the following disclaimer:

“This information is provided for your convenience. The United States Courts do not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of outside information. These documents and sites do not necessarily reflect the opinions, standards, or policies of the United States Courts and the links to them are not intended to endorse any views, products and services, or organizations. The copyright for any archived material remains with the original authors and publishers. Authors of copyrighted materials linked to in this archive may have their link manually removed by contacting the webmaster@lb9.uscourts.gov.”

This approach makes a considerable amount of sense.

PDF/A

We have written a lot about PDF formats in the past. The article that notes the guidance the US National Archives and Records Administration issued regarding the use of PDF is a good starting point.  That article with references is available here.

M-Disc

I have an M-Disc optical reader/writer that cost less than $25 USD.  From my readings, this seems to be the best solution for digital media that you can hold in your hand and lock away in a safe … or two or three.  Check it out for yourself at: http://www.mdisc.com/

Virtual Machines

Your data is much less useful without the computer systems and application programs that it was created with. The US National Archives reported more than a decade ago that one of their key findings and in turn, their solutions to create and save computer virtual machine environments and the application programs as the archive.

It recently became clear that I needed to use this approach to retrieve some e-mail messages that I had saved in the 1990’s.  There are no readers or converters for the type of e-mail system that the NCSC used during that time.  So I intend to create a VM … probably with VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/ ) running Windows 98 and the e-mail application program.

If I were a court with an older CMS I would certainly consider doing something very similar.
Here is a web page with various operating system images for VirtualBox as an example.  But there are many available online for the various types of systems that existed in the past.

Computer Output Microfilm (COM)

While it pains me to say, many jurisdictions require microfilm/microfiche archival records.  Please note that one does not have to print out the information on paper and then scan it into the film camera.  One can simply “print” to the film directly thus avoiding a very costly step.  A COM vendor explains more at: http://microfiche.scanning360.com/what-is-computer-output-microfilm/

Cloud

And last, the newest, and in many ways the easiest, place to put data is into cloud backup services.  The cloud services should have multiple (more than two) copies of every file submitted distributed to data centers.  The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published a “roadmap” on Cloud Computer Technology in 2014 that can be a starting place for thinking about using this approach.  It is available as a PDF document here.

Conclusion

In my opinion, there is no one answer for courts to preserve the record in the 21st Century, only strategies.  Please share below if you have other ideas that you are using.