[Oe List ...] Archive Questions

Mon May 25 16:58:48 EDT 2009

I sent this quite some time ago, but the chain was too long and I didn't notice it did not get sent. If somehow it did, I apologize for the duplication but if not here is my attempt to answer some of the questions raised.

Marshall and others, 

You and others have raised some very good questions and I hope I can answer some of them, maybe in general terms, but somewhere out there are the true answers. 

At my work we have several teams of two going out to the county court houses to shoot pictures of the public record in terms of ownership of land and minerals. They have shot millions of images of pages in each legal document file in the record. The images are done with a digital camera, and each trained team can shoot between 3,000 and 10,000 images per day. The cost for this is calculated at 16 cents per page.

If we did the Archives it would require 3,440,000 images. That, of course, is an estimate from me having painfully counted the number of pages I had in one full drawer in a four drawer file cabinet. The number of pages in that full drawer was 5000. So the math for 172 file cabinets with 4 drawers each, presummably full, works out. Now, that 16 cents covers a vehicle, a digital camera, a laptop, 6 meals a day (a team of 2) hotel for two each night, and a $400 day rate for the team members. We would not need to have all of those expenses. Between the People of the Order, ICA staff, and the University (see "Archives Opportunity", a late posting on the listserves) we could get that cost dramatically lower, I would say to somewhere between 2 cents ($68,000) and 4 cents ($137,600). This work would have to be done on location in the Kemper Building. It would require 1133 human days for one team to do this.

The cost could be covered through a joint effort on the part of the University, who can get grants for such things we cannot, the ICA/EI through its funding sources, and the People of the Order. The People of the Order could fund this alone but I think the collaboration with all the parties involved will be preferable.

The location of the physical archives, presummably, would be in a climate and humidity controlled environment in the Kemper Building but your suggestion for a duplicate set of Archives be located in another city was exactly what needs to happen. Let me refer you again to a late posting of "Archives Opportunity" which you may not yet have seen. This opportunity is perfect for what we are trying to do regarding the Living Archives and the Living Legacy.

I regret it was not clear in what I've said previously that everything would be accessible on-line. My entire assumption is that all of the Global Archives, and personal archives would be completely available on-line. I guess I assummed it so much I didn't mention it. All the Archives would be available to Anyone, at Anytime, from Anywhere, at not cost. I am strongly opposed to any charges for access, or restrictions to it, only that the base Archive would be inviolate. 

The long term storage is a more difficult question and not knowing what future technologies are going to be makes it impossible to have total assurance that we will still have a retrievable archive. However, the storage will be in a data warehouse and backed up in the ethernet cloud. They will not be stored on DVD's, nor CD's. In the digitizing of the Archives DVD's will be used at the laptop level to transfer the images from the camera to the data warehouse. So, we would have a copy on the DVD but that is not what I consider primary storage for all the reasons you mentioned. At work we have 10 terrabytes of storage in the data warehouse and that is sufficient for tens of millions images. I don't think it will require that much, but if these Archives are used for research and development purposes as is the plan the Archives will continue to expand because they have begun to have life, maybe even abundantly. Given the digital character of the Archives, they can be migrated into almost any new technology that comes along making our equipment obsolete. 

If the audio, video Archives in your possession where recorded on equipment created after 1960, they are retrievable and can be pulled into the Archives. This is being done all of the time.

Now, you must not die yet, or if you do, you have to hang around long enough for this task to be finished before your ascension. After we get the 172 file cabinets digitized, plus your audio/video components digitized, it is very important for every one of the People of the Order to arrange to have their personal archives included in the Global Archives, but tagged with the owners name, and when a search is done for that person, their entire archive will show up. Now, of course, that is only if the People of the Order want to do that, but they do have Order archives and they have created their own archives out of their work since 1988. 

What is of interest to people is not so much the archives of EI/ICA but that group of people who came together for all walks of life, formed themselves into a secular religious order so they could effectively respond to the last half of the 20th Century. This is more of an address today than it was in the 20th Century. For example, if you consider the salary checks Suzanne turned over to the Order during our years in the Order it would be something like $384,000 (average of $24,000 per year) and you add to that my lost income because I worked "in" of $768,000 (average of $48,000 per year). The total is a contribution to EI/ICA of $1,150,000. This is not an insignificant fact, nor for us it was unusal. It was done hundreds of times with other People of the Order. That is a radical address for anyone who is alive in the 21st Century. It is the People of the Order that is of interest, but I don't believe our opportunities can do anything but strengthen the ICA, the EI legacy, and the legacy of those people.

Well, Marshall and the other People of the Order, I truly hope you will take extra precaution against death, take care of yourself, for there is a good reason for you to do so.

Bill Parker
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