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by Patrick Thibodeau

WASHINGTON, D.C. (IDG) -- When President Clinton leaves the White House in January, his legacy will include an e-mail system with some 40 million messages on it. Those records, by law, must go to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The NARA has the task of storing and preserving those messages for as long as it has to, which is pretty much forever.

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But "for practical purposes, there is no durable digital media," said Kenneth Thibodeau, director of the electronic records program at the NARA.

And that's not the only problem. The volume of records is increasing dramatically as agencies begin turning over records generated on PCs in a variety of formats. In a recent report to Congress, the U.S. General Accounting Office said the Archive faces a "substantial challenge."

The NARA believes the only way it may be able to keep up with the explosion in electronic records -- from tens of thousands to millions annually -- is to replace its homegrown system of PCs with supercomputers.

It's an effort that may ultimately produce ideas that benefit businesses with long-term records preservation needs, say users and analysts.

"It certainly is an issue that we're facing and are going to face a lot more as we automate a lot of our health records," said Dave Bowlan, manager of information management at Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. in Pasadena, Calif.

Kaiser is developing a strategy for long-term electronic records management and will be watching NARA to see if it can come up with an affordable solution, Bowlan said.

The NARA has been working with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to attempt to resolve these storage issues. Using a million e-mail messages as a test, SDSC has "shown us through massively parallel processing that you can handle this," Thibodeau said.

SDSC is using a supercomputer to speed migrations of data to new media, reformatting to meet new standards and importing metadata into new catalogs, among other things.

SDSC has also been using Extensible Markup Language (XML) tags to keep track of all the documents -- something "which has a lot of market support," Thibodeau said.

Long-term storage is another problem, because there's no storage medium that can guarantee multi-decade life. But having to move data to new medium, as NARA does every 10 years, actually has benefits. The new storage medium typically holds more data at less cost and also improves access to that data, Thibodeau said.