Archivists fighting to preserve Nevada records

Wednesday, Dec. 1, 1999 | 9:38 a.m.

"We've had some real success stories," said Shayne Del Cohen, a member of the Nevada State Historical Records Advisory Board. "But there's a real argument there that governments just don't have the funds."

"If you had the choice of paying to keep the lights on in a building or building a storage facility for records, which would you choose?"

A 1997 report from the records advisory board described a bleak situation that, for the most part, still exists today.

"Two-thirds of records-keepers found their records and storage facilities unsatisfactory; 80 percent reported that their facilities lacked sprinklers or other means of extinguishing fires. Yet fewer than one in five had decided what they would save in case of disaster."

Left unchecked, the poor state of record keeping in Nevada could haunt tens of thousands of people in future years.

"Let's say 65 years from now someone living in Baltimore needs a copy of her birth certificate to get retirement benefits," Del Cohen said. "She knows she was born in Elko, but will she be able to track it down? Will a developer 40 years from now be able to find the records of water rights? Will there be records of unexpired mineral leases?"

As electronic records replace paper records, the questions Del Cohen asks become even more important. In some jurisdictions, the older paper documents are separate from newer electronic records. The two may never be available in the same format.

Even when all the records are electronic, they can be lost when a government or a company changes hardware or software formats. In addition, few governments set policies on what needs to be kept.

"It's a major headache," Del Cohen said. "There's not a lot of law on the books. Governments need to have a policy on what has to be kept and how it's to be kept."

She's seen paper records piled on top of heaters, basement closets stacked with documents, and magnetic disks stored in telephone rooms where magnetic fields could erase the data.