Fire burning a building at Keysight Technologies in Santa Rosa, California which contained 100 boxes of Hewlett Packard’s Historical archives. AP Photo/Ben Margot, File.
When the Tubbs Fire hit Keysight Technology’s northern California campus this October, 100 boxes of Hewlett Packard’s archives were incinerated. Archivists bemoaned the destruction of HP’s historical materials as a preventable tragedy. Many wondered why such valuable materials were given to Keysight (a spinoff company of HP). Others questioned why the materials were in a modular building in a fire-prone area.
Keysight claimed it followed strict guidelines set by the UN and Library of Congress, including a sprinkler system and open steel shelving. Keysight wrote, however, that these measures were no match for a fire “so intense that many fire-resistant safes were melted and destroyed.”
Keysight was not alone in facing unprecedented events linked to climate change. Several disasters hit North America this fall, prompting multiple blog posts from NARA that provided guidance on disaster preparedness and records recovery. In May, melting permafrost flooded the supposedly impenetrable Svalbard seed vault.
The destruction of HP’s archives is a cautionary tale demonstrating that facilities design, environmental controls, and disaster procedures are important components of effective archival and records management programs alike. The event is also a wakeup call to archivists and records managers that existing best-practices need to be adapted to contend with threats to records and recordkeeping systems posed by climate change.
As Eira Tansey and Heidi N. Abbey have both identified, discussions about adapting archival and records management practices to climate change have primarily focused on physical interventions that can counteract the impacts of extreme weather. Such interventions might include relocating repositories, designing facilities impervious to natural disasters, or environmental controls that contend with increased heat or humidity.
Despite the fact that Keysight undertook none of these controls, recordkeeping practices implemented during the records’ creation have perhaps ensured the survival of some of HP’s archival material. David Packard insisted on creating carbon copies and archivists hold out hope that these can be located. In effect, good records management might have saved HP’s archives against fire.
With its holistic view that a record’s preservation begins at the moment of its creation, strong records management ensures the physical, intellectual, and legal integrity of records throughout their life cycle. Recent developments in electronic records management and digital recordkeeping can mitigate climate change from a records perspective by ensuring the ongoing existence and authority of records, and the data contained within them, even in times of extreme destruction. In so doing, records managers can take an active role in supporting larger climate action initiatives in society.
Can Electronic Records Management Save the World?
In an interview with The Press Democrat, former HP archivist Karen Lewis suggested that Keysight’s failure to digitize materials was one of its many oversights. While Lewis’s comment applies to archival practice, it also underscores that paperless or electronic records systems are not only a backup system to ensure accountability or for auditing purposes as ARMA’s Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles suggest. Electronic records management systems will become necessary to ensure the integrity, reliability, and protection of information against growing threats of physical destruction.
Electronic records management might also just be good for the environment. In his article “Can RIM Save the World?” Chris Wacker argues that electronic records management is environmentally sustainable and as such, is good business practice. Electronic records management allows organizations to run more efficiently in both material and managerial ways by centralizing and automating the management and storage of records electronically. Through its efficiency, along with its lack of reliance on the paper industry, electronic records management might thus play an active role in greening business practices.
Lewis’s comment also suggests that distributed digital storage will become a necessary component of any disaster preparedness plan under climate change where both records and the technological systems that store and manage them are prone to destruction. This is borne out by evidence, according to Patricia C. Franks in Records and Information Management, that organizations are turning to cloud-based storage solutions that increasingly include disaster and recovery services (217).
Resilient and Reliable Records Systems
The cloud and electronic records management may prove resilient to the physical impacts of climate change and offer clear business advantages however, these systems are not without their drawbacks. The cloud opens up digital records to tampering and security breaches, impacting their trustworthiness as evidence. Reliable and secure digital recordkeeping systems are thus required to ensure the authenticity and reliability of digital records, as well as the transactions they participate in.
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that is quickly gaining popularity as a trustworthy system for ensuring the authenticity of digital documents and transactions. Blockchain link records of a transaction together in a closed-loop using cryptography, which allows it to distribute the recordkeeping tasks through a decentralized network securely.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recently published an article recognizing the potential of blockchain technology to tackle climate change. It can, for instance host peer-to-peer networks for the secure trade and distribution of renewable energy (like the company LO3 Energy is attempting). Blockchain can also serve as a tool for efficiently monitoring greenhouse gas emissions by preventing the doubling of data. In essence, blockchain builds trust in and through digital transactions; a previously missing component that has perhaps inhibited the growth of global environmental action and governance.
Environmental Recordkeeping
Map of countries that consume less energy than the amount consumed by global bitcoin mining. Powercompare.
While blockchain can mobilize information and resources in support of global climate change action initiatives, it is a technology with a large carbon footprint. One Bitcoin transaction on the blockchain uses 90 percent of an American household’s daily average electricity consumption. Greenpeace reported this year that cloud computing companies use about 7% of global electricity. And Mark Wolfe argues that the paperless office has in fact led to greater consumption of resources.
As these statistics make clear, electronic records and digital recordkeeping can both enhance and undermine climate change mitigation efforts. Nonetheless, the management of electronic and digital records is an arena where the records management field can innovate against the effects of climate change and perhaps take a direct role in climate action. As environmental data becomes politicized and prone to a different kind of destruction, the design of recordkeeping systems ensure the preservation and authority of records will become increasingly important to the global fight against climate change.