THE PRIMACY AND PROBLEMS OF DIGITAL RECORDS:
THE CALIFORNIA OCCUPATIONAL INFORMATION
COORDINATING COMMITTEE RECORDS
AT THE CALIFORNIA STATE ARCHIVES
Tyler Gilbert Cline
B.A., Humboldt State University, 2009
PROJECT
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
HISTORY
(Public History)
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
SPRING
2011
© 2011
Tyler Gilbert Cline
ALL RIGHTS RESERVEDTHE PRIMACY AND PROBLEMS OF DIGITAL RECORDS:
THE CALIFORNIA OCCUPATIONAL INFORMATION
COORDINATING COMMITTEE RECORDS
ii
AT THE CALIFORNIA STATE ARCHIVES
A Project
by
Tyler Gilbert Cline
Approved By:
_____________________________, Committee Chair
Lee M. A. Simpson, Ph.D.
_____________________________, Second Reader
Jeffrey Crawford
_____________________
Date
Student: Tyler Gilbert Cline
iii
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University
format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to
be awarded for this Project.
___________________________, Department Chair
Aaron J. Cohen, Ph.D.
____________
Date
Department of History
Abstract
of
THE PRIMACY AND PROBLEMS OF DIGITAL RECORDS:
THE CALIFORNIA OCCUPATIONAL INFORMATION
COORDINATING COMMITTEE RECORDS
AT THE CALIFORNIA STATE ARCHIVES
by
Tyler Gilbert Cline
Statement of Problem
The records of the Occupational Information Coordinating Committee include floppy
diskettes and CD-ROMs. The files on these electronic media could not be processed because the State Archives has not developed procedures for processing electronic records.
Sources of Data
Data sources for this project included monographs, newspaper articles, journal articles,
archival materials, unpublished manuals and guidelines, emails, memoranda, publications, and web pages.
Conclusions Reached
iv
The inability to describe the media according to archival best practices left the author
with valuable insight into the functions of large archives without existing electronic records management programs as well as an understanding of the developments in the field
of electronic records management.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Lee M. A. Simpson, Ph.D.
_____________________
DateDEDICATION
To my father, my greatest teacher. Without your love and support this would
never have been possible. Without your guidance my love for learning would never have
sprouted.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work would not have been possible without the guidance and friendship of
Lee Simpson and Jeff Crawford. Dr. Simpson, thank you for lending me a sympathetic
ear during my first semester when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Jeff,
you’ve been guiding positive force and a great boss; and to the extent that managing processing students is like herding cats that’s saying something.
To all at the archives who made this thesis possible, Jeff and Sara, Breanne Cato,
and my fellow processing students. Without your institutional knowledge I would be lost
in a morass of red tape and headache.
To all my teachers, whose inspiration took me on wings of knowledge and fascination through this great academic journey over the last decade, thank you. Andrea Tarv
antino, Craig Parker, Gayle Olson-Raymer, my life is better for having known you, my
love of history, of knowledge, of education and society is stronger for having known your
wisdom.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Dedication .......................................................................................................................... vi
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................. vii
Chapter
1. METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................................1
Accessioning ............................................................................................................2
Agency History ........................................................................................................7
Arrangement ..........................................................................................................10
Description .............................................................................................................15
Conclusions ............................................................................................................18
2. ELECTRONIC RECORDS .........................................................................................20
Preservation of Physical Media .............................................................................21
Preservation of Digital Data...................................................................................25
Metadata .................................................................................................................31
Integrity and Authenticity ......................................................................................32
Electronic Records Program ..................................................................................37
3. FINDINGS ...................................................................................................................41
Findings..................................................................................................................42
Conclusions ............................................................................................................45
vi
Appendix A. Inventory of the COICC Records ..............................................................47
Appendix B. Sample Processing Plan .............................................................................64
Appendix C. Sample Catalog Cards ................................................................................66
Appendix D. Sample Box Labels ....................................................................................69
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................75
vii
1
Chapter 1
METHODOLOGY
Records created by agencies and interagency committees of the State of California that are determined to have enduring value are kept in perpetuity for the people of
California. The repository for such records is the California State Archives, a division of
the Office of the Secretary of State.1 California’s Constitution of 1849 charged the Secretary of State with keeping “a fair record of the official acts of the legislative and executive departments of the Government.”2 The first law passed by the Legislature and chaptered as Chapter 1 of the Statutes of 1850 codified this constitutional responsibility to include:
all public records, registers, maps, books, papers, rolls, documents, and
other writings...which pertain to…the political, civil, and military history,
and past administration of the Government in California; the titles to
bonds within the territory, or any other subject…references or authorities
to the Government, or people of the State.3
The State Archives has been the repository for such records since its establishment on
January 5, 1850. Records of State agencies at the end of their operational lifecycle and
not destroyed are transferred to the State Records Center for storage. Those records
which are flagged for destruction by their official records retention schedules but catego-
1
Preserving and Promoting the History of California, Brochure (Sacramento: California State
Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, n.d.).
2
Constitution of the State of California, Adopted 1849, Article V, Section 19.
3
California, An Act Concerning the Public Archives, Statutes of 1850, 1:44.
2
rized as having enduring value are transferred to the State Archives upon the end of their
informational lifecycle and storage period at the State Records Center.4
Accessioning
The records of the California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee,
or the COICC, came to the California State Archives over a period of years from 1998 to
2006 in four separate accessions, ranging from five to twenty-one cubic feet of records
each. The accessioning process is one in which records are transferred to the State Archives in physical form. The Archives also gains intellectual and legal control and authority over records. These three forms of control: physical, intellectual, and legal, constitute an accession, and guarantee that the Archives may properly provide access to the
records for researchers.5 The first of these such accessions occurred in July 1998, and
included twenty-one cubic feet of records from the inception of the COICC in 1978
through Program Year 1994.6 The accession worksheet filled out by the accessioning
archivist listed only textual materials as being present, although later examination by the
author during processing yielded three-quarters of one cubic foot of electronic records in
the form of 5 ¼” and 3 ½” floppy diskettes.7 The accession worksheet listed the contents
Jessica Herrick, “Records Retention Schedules and Accessioning,” presentation to the California
State Archives, 14 July 2010.
5
Gregory S. Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives: A How-To-Do-It Manund
al, 2 Ed. (New York: Neal Schuman Publishers, 2004), 101-102.
6
Accession Number 1998-07-10, Accessioning Worksheet, Accessioning Program Records, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, 1998.
7
“Micro-OIS Version 1.0,” Occupational Information System Development Files, Occupational
Information Coordinating Committee Records, R189.08, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary
of State, Sacramento, California.
4
3
of the accession as “memoranda, committee minutes, agenda, correspondence, operations
and budgets, reports, curricula, and projects.”8
Accession worksheets are prepared by the accessioning archivists, and contain
information about the collection. This information may come from records retention
schedules provided by the agency transferring the records, or from the records themselves. Information listed on the worksheets typically includes the record creator, the title of records series within the collection, the date span of the records, the size of the collection in cubic feet, the arrangement of the records, any restrictions to access by researchers, and any notes the archivist may make during the accessioning process. More
often than not, not all fields on the accession worksheet will be completed, either because
the archivist cannot find the information, or because such information is not readily accessible without thoroughly processing the collection.9
Often, only a cursory glance through the records will be performed, in order to
remove acidic papers and metal which might rust. This cursory examination can often
make the arrangement of the records harder for subsequent archivists, as well as researchers who request the records in the mean time. During processing, records which
arrive with no apparent discernible arrangement will be arranged by a processing archivist, who will determine the logical or functional arrangement of the records according to
best practices. As accessioning grants the Archives basic and perfunctory control over
the records, greater physical and intellectual control is established during processing.
8
Accession Number 1998-07-10, Accessioning Worksheet, Accessioning Program Records, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, 1998.
9
Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, 93.
4
The second accession came in November of 1998, and contained twenty cubic
feet of textual records ranging from 1980 through 1995. The arrangement of these records was listed as “to be determined,” and subsequent examination by the author during
processing revealed that the records were most likely in their original order as prepared
by the COICC during transfer. However, the records were organized neither chronologically nor by subject. The record types listed on the accession worksheet included “correspondence, annual plans, program guidelines, grants, minutes, contracts, and publications.”10
The third accession arrived at the Archives in 2002, and from its description was a
“catch-all,” group of records, spanning the years 1982-2000. These five cubic feet of
records were accessioned by Deputy State Archivist Laren Metzer, and included correspondence, meeting files, and files of the Executive Director of the COICC.11 The last
group of records, accessioned by Archivist Jessica Herrick, included six cubic feet of textual records as well as electronic records on approximately one dozen CD-ROMs.12
These records were accessioned in 2006, and included “interagency correspondence, conference information, publications, meeting information, and Occupational Outlook reports.”13
10
Accession Number 1998-11-35, Accessioning Worksheet, Accessioning Program Records, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, 1998.
11
Accession Number 2002-198, Accessioning Worksheet, Accessioning Program Records, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, 2002.
12
Accession Number 2006-090, Accessioning Worksheet, Accessioning Program Records, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, 2006.
13
Accession Number 2006-090, Accessioning Worksheet, Accessioning Program Records, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, 2006.
5
The records of the COICC as accessioned totaled fifty-two cubic feet, spanned the
dates from 1978 to 2004, and comprises both textual and electronic records. During accessioning, the records were placed into acid and lignin free cardboard boxes, but little
else besides the removal of rusted paper clips or disintegrating rubber bands took place.
The processing of these records by the author thus served two functions: the first was to
increase their physical and informational value by arranging them into series and describing said series using best archival practices; the second was to allow researchers to search
the record group through the Minerva online database. This allows archivists and staff to
efficiently locate these records for researchers.
While these records contain no legal restrictions to access and are technically and
legally open to the public for research, the lack of organization through arrangement and
description during the accessioning phase meant that until processing was completed, the
public would have less complete and less open access to the records.14 While accessioning is an important step towards furthering the Archives’ physical and intellectual control
over the records, it remains a first step. According to author and archivist Greg Hunter,
the processing of a collection is the true “bridge between the records and their use by researchers of various types.”15
As accessioned, the collection included subject files, correspondence, meeting
files, memoranda, minutes, agendas, operational budgets, curricula, project files, background information, and reports on the development of systems used by the committee.
14
15
Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, 101-102.
Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, 113.
6
These records were not organized by series within the accessioned material, nor were
they organized by year. With the guidance of Archivist Jeff Crawford, the author undertook a search for the copies of the COICC’s records retentions schedules which were
submitted to the State Archives at intervals required by law.16 The internal catalog of the
Archives’ “Minerva” database, created using GENCAT software, contains accession information and collections information in the form of finding aids and digitized records
retention schedules.
The author found that the COICC submitted two records retention schedules, one
in 1998 and another in 2005. Each of these retention schedules list the COICC as having
dramatically different records series. While the contrast between these two schedules can
be attributed to the gradual shift in program direction over these seven years, the differences between the records listed on the retention schedules and those which the archives
received are harder to reconcile. Because these differences made it considerably harder
to develop a proper processing plan for the arrangement and description of the records
without knowing the true original order of the collection, the author found the need to
research the agency history of the COICC.
Agency History
The California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee was created by
an act of the legislature in response to the national Comprehensive Employment Training
16
Department of General Services, Records Retention Schedule Guidelines, California Records
and Information Management (CalRIM) (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 2007), 4.
7
Act of 1973, or CETA17
The Comprehensive Employment Training Act was passed by
the 93rd Congress and chaptered as Public Law 93-203.18 This act created the National
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee as a federal level interagency committee with consolidated responsibilities for funding federal job training programs, for the
unemployed, underemployed, the disadvantaged, and youth. The NOICC coordinated
with state level Occupational Information Coordinating Committees or SOICCs, and distributed block grants and the Basic Assistance Grants to state level programs which met
the NOICC’s development guidelines.19
The California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (COICC) or
California SOICC was established by statutory authority in the Statutes of 1975, Chapter
853.20 The Committee consisted of the Director of Employment Development, the Director of Commerce, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, the Director of Rehabilitation, the chair of the State Job Training Coordinating Council, the Executive Director of the Employment Training Panel, the
Director of Social Services, and the Executive Secretary of the Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education. The goal of the committee was to act as an advisory body to the Employment Development Department in the department's operation of
“COICC History,” Memoranda Files, Occupational Information Coordinating Committee Records, R189.05, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
18
Comprehensive Employment Training Act of 1973, Pub. L. 93-203, Oct. 27, 1973, 92 Stat. 1909
(29 U.S.C. 801).
19
NOICC Records Retention Schedule, National Archives and Records Administration, 7 July
2000.
20
Labor Market Information Systems, Chapter 853, Statutes of 1975.
17
8
the State-Local Cooperative Labor Market Information Development Program or LMID,
as specified in the above mentioned federally funded program requirements.
In 1984, the authorizing legislation granting the COICC statutory authority was
shifted from the Education code to the unemployment insurance code. The COICC was
defined as an interagency committee in the Unemployment Insurance Code sections
10531 and 10532, with the same language, structure, and board composition as the previous statutes.21 The scope and mission of the COICC was modified several times after its
inception. Revised federal legislation such as the Job Training Partnership Act of of
1982 provided funding through the NOICC for state level OICs to fund job corps, adult
and youth education programs, and labor market information statistics programs. These
LMI programs included gathering, publishing, and promulgation of labor market information.22 During this time, the COICC, which had a full-time staff of two and one half
persons, began efforts to promulgate labor market information for California. The
COICC chose a distributed model for this information, with the intent to facilitate coordination between the California State College system and the Private Industry Councils of
major California cities such as San José, Fresno, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San
Diego.23
The national Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1984
further restructured the NOICC/SOICC relationship by providing funding and mandates
for the creation of technical and vocational education programs. The COICC was en21
Unemployment Insurance Code, Chapter 4, Contributions and Reports, Section 10531.
Job Training Partnership Act, Pub. L. 97-300, October 13, 1982, 96 Stat.1322 (29 U.S.C. 1501).
23
OIS Development Files, California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee Records,
R189.07 California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
22
9
couraged to sponsor and track the successes of vocational programs in California. These
mandates continued until Congress passed the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, which
restructured the NOICC into America’s Career Resource Network.24
In 1998 the committee became part of America’s Career Resource Network as
funded under the Workforce Investment Act. The committee was restructured in 2005,
following the passage of SB655 (Midgin), which repealed the Unemployment Insurance
Code sections 10531 and 10532, replacing them with Education Code section 53086.25
The committee was renamed the California Career Resource Network and became a special program within the Department of Education. The members now included the Director of Employment Development, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, the
Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, the Director of Rehabilitation, the Director of Social Services, the Executive Director of the California Workforce Investment
Board, the Chief Deputy of the Adult Programs Division, Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation, the Chief Deputy of the Juvenile Justice Division, Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and the Director of the Department of Developmental Services.26 The program then had the goal to distribute career information, resources, and
training materials to middle school and high school counselors, educators, and administrators, in order to ensure that middle schools and high schools have the necessary infor-
24
Workforce Investment Act of 1998, Pub. L. 105-220, August 7, 1998, 112 Stat. 936.
SB665, California Career Resource Network, Chapter 208, Statutes of 2005.
26
The California Career Resource Network, www.californiacareers.info.
25
10
mation available to provide a pupil with guidance and instruction on education and job
requirements necessary for career development.27
Arrangement
Archival processing, comprised of the arrangement and description of records, is
at the heart of an archives’ mission.28 After obtaining the original accession worksheets
for the accessioned COICC records, the author stamped the duplicate worksheets in the
research room as “out for processing.” The author then physically removed the fifty-two
cubic feet of records from climate-controlled storage stacks to the general processing area, known as the “Processing Lab.” The author then sent an email to the State Archives
staff notifying them that the records were “out for processing” and could be located at the
author’s desk so the records could be accessed and retrieved by researchers while the records were being processed. The Archives’ “Minerva” GENCAT online database was updated with this information, so researchers would know that the collection was being processed.
The author researched the agency history of the COICC to determine the scope,
background, and purpose of the committee. He then compared the files found in the boxes of the collection with both the accession worksheets and the records retention schedules in order to arrive at a basic conception of the records series contained within the col-
27
Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, 207.
Kathleen D. Roe, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: The Society
of American Archivists, 2005), 2.
28
11
lection. The following twelve series were preliminarily identified as follows (further description can be found in Appendix A):
Agency Files
Conference Files
Correspondence
Meeting Files
Memoranda Files
Office Files
OIS Development Files
Outlook Reports
Program Files
Project Files
Report Files
Subject Files29
Following the guidelines set forth in the State Archives’ Processing Manual, written by
deputy State Archivist Laren Metzer in 2004, the author then submitted a plan for processing the records to supervisor Jeff Crawford, processing coordinator for the Archives.30 According to the processing manual, processing plans are based on a “preliminary review of records,” and remain subject to change.31 The plan includes the records
creator, the condition of the records, the subjects covered by the records, restrictions, if
any, and the types of material, in this case textual and electronic. The plan spells out the
arrangement, including series and sub-series. that the records are to take.
The arrangement and description of records is based upon two concepts in archival theory: provenance and original order. The first, provenance, comes from a French
term meaning “stems from.” Since the records were created by the COICC, held at the
29
Guide to the California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee Records, R189.01R189.12. California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California, 2011.
30
Laren Metzer, “Processing Manual” (Sacramento: California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, June 2004), 3.
31
Metzer, “Processing Manual,” 6.
12
State Records Center, and then transferred to the Archives, the chain of custody was well
documented and the provenance of the records is known. The second term, “original order,” is related to the French respect des fonds, meaning respect for property.32 Hunter
maintains that original order is much harder to implement than it sounds. At the most
basic level, original order refers to keeping records in a collection organized in the same
fashion as they were by the organization that created them. In the practical sense however, this becomes harder to implement. Archivist and author Kathleen D. Roe of the Society of American Archivists writes that the preservation of original order makes for a
greater “understanding of the context in which the records were used, which can provide
important clues for the potential researcher in discovering the function of specific documents or agencies that created those documents.”33
For the records of the COICC, the span of years between accessions, the shift
from NOICC sponsorship to ACRN sponsorship, and the differences between records
flagged for preservation by the records retention schedules and those accessioned by the
Archives all meant that the author had to attempt to reinvent the original order for the
records whole cloth. The most useful tool for this process was DACS, or Describing Archives: A Content Standard by the Society of American Archivists.34 This work includes
guidelines for description of specific elements of the collection, and provides a working
guide to the creation of a finding aid. The State Archives also partially follows the new
paradigm of arrangement and description put forth by Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner
32
Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, 113.
Roe, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts, 15.
34
Society of American Archivists, Describing Archives: A Content Standard (Chicago: Society of
American Archivists, 2004).
33
13
in “More Product, Less Process,” in which records are described to the series level for a
given finding aid.35 While this is applicable to textual records, an exploration of item
level for electronic records was undertaken where possible, and hardware or software
limitations did not prevent it.
The processing of the records began by combining similar record series that
spanned different accessions. Meeting files, memoranda, and subject files were the easiest to combine into their proper records series. Occupational Information Development
Files, composed of both textual and electronic records, were the hardest to combine. The
electronic records, found on both floppy diskette and CD-ROM were nearly inaccessible
before the Archives acquired a “clean machine” on which to view the records. The clean
computer was “locked down” with minimal network access and user privileges, which
provided the author with the ability to access files on 3 ½” floppy diskette and CD-ROM
without the possibility of harming either the integrity and original order of the electronic
data, or the network of the Office of the Secretary of State and State Archives.
Following the instructions in the processing manual, which specified that records
of enduring value were to be kept, but allowing that the author had broad intellectual
leeway to determine which records were of enduring value, the author reduced over thirty-eight cubic feet from the collection, consisting of duplicate items, bulky binders and
file folders, material irrelevant to the history and scope of the COICC, and information
which contained the personal information of private individuals.36 Likewise, rusted staMark Greene and Dennis Meissner, “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing,” The American Archivist, 68 (Fall/Winter 2005): 208-263.
36
Metzer, “Processing Manual,” 13.
35
14
ples, paper clips, three-ring binders, plastic binding materials, and plastic report covers
were all removed from the collection. Blank forms, blank paper, publications, hardback
and paperback books, and office supplies were also discarded. Newsprint, acidic paper,
transparency sheets, and thermographic facsimile paper were all photocopied onto acid
free paper and the originals were removed from the collection to prevent the destruction
of the information which they contained, as well as any collateral damage from the leaking of acid onto other records.
Many CD-ROMs were removed from the collection after cursory examination of
their data revealed that they were secondary records not created by the COICC, nor of
any particular informational value to researchers of the COICC’s history or operations.
Additional preservation of the textual records was accomplished by “re-foldering” the
documents into acid and lignin free folders and boxes. Rubber bands, pins, and fasteners
were removed. Sticky notes and telegrams were removed and photocopied onto acid free
paper. Bent documents were straightened to the best of the author’s ability, and extraneous information was removed. No significant preservation work was required by the
preservation staff at the archives.37 The majority of the textual information discarded was
duplicate items, accounting for nearly forty cubic feet of wasted space. Similarly, publications and binders took up a significant amount of space, while the rest of the textual
items discarded contained personally identifiable information with no enduring informational value to the archives.
37
Metzer, “Processing Manual,” 23.
15
After refoldering and arranging the records, weeding out superfluous and unnecessary records, and removing paper clips, post-it notes, binders, and newsprint, the author
arranged the re-foldered records into proper series in one cubic foot archival boxes. Each
folder was hand numbered in number 4 pencil with the unique record group identification
number, called an “R Number,” as well as sequential folder numbers along with the name
of the records creator, series title, and folder contents for each individual folder. During
this process the author took notes on series for entry into the master finding aid.
Description
Gregory Hunter categorizes the description phase of archival processing as “establishing administrative and intellectual control over archives through the preparation of
finding aids.”38 The processing manual calls for certain details to be included in the master finding aid for any given collection. These details include:
The history and predecessor names of the records creator, inclusive dates,
overall content, organization, types of materials and research value, total
volume and restrictions on access. At the record unit level [series], the unit
title, inclusive dates, volume, arrangement, summary description and restrictions on access.39
For each file folder of records, which was numbered with a number four hard lead pencil
with the record identification number and series number, agency name (COICC), series,
date range, and item level titles, information was compiled for use in the master finding
aid. The file folders were placed into acid free archival boxes of one cubic foot each, and
labeled using archival practices found in the Processing Manual. These box labels were
38
39
Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, 131.
Metzer, “Processing Manual,” 16.
16
created using a Microsoft Access database with a custom designed layout. The labels
included the record identification number, agency name, series, and date range.
The box and folder numbers were then incorporated into the finding aid, which also
included scope and content notes for the entire collection, an agency history of the Occupational Information Coordinating Committee, and a list of the records series with corresponding descriptions. The series included Correspondence Files, Subject Files, Project
Files, Memoranda, Occupational Information System development files, and meeting
files. The scope and content served as a narrative for the series, highlighting important
details in the history of the COICC such as the passage of the Perkins Act for vocational
education.40 The series titles were drawn from DACS, and the policy of the State Archives mandated that records were to be described at the series level with appropriate hierarchy when necessary.41
After completing the finding aid, the author created catalog cards for inclusion in
the Archives research room card catalog. These cards were created using Microsoft
Word and printed on card stock. One catalog card was created for each series of records
within the COICC records, and each card included the physical location of the records in
the archives stacks, the record number, and the agency name. These cards were then
added to the card catalog for “quick reference” by researchers.42
Following this, the author removed the COICC records from the archival and museum processing laboratory on the third floor of the archives to the fourth floor of the
40
Guide to the California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee Records, R189.01R189.12., California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California, 2011.
41
Metzer, “Processing Manual,” 26.
42
Metzer, “Processing Manual,” 26.
17
climate controlled stacks, or the “D” floor, where the records would be permanently
housed. The accession sheets held in a binder in the research room were removed and
delivered to the processing coordinator, and the finding aid was submitted for review. In
an email, the archives staff was notified of the new permanent location for the COICC
records, as well as the addition of cards to the catalog and the review of the finding aid
for the committee records. The finding aid was then encoded using Encoded Archival
Description (EAD), a markup language for web based archival description, and added to
the Online Archive of California.43 The encoded file was saved as an extensible markup
language (XML) file for uniformity and ease of access to the encoded information. The
finding aid was also entered into the Minerva database, which generates responses from
GenCat, a database program with a proprietary markup language. However, both Minerva and the Online Archive of California are accessible through the internet external to the
Archives servers.
Conclusions
The processing of the California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee records was a long and drawn-out process which took over seven months to complete.
The author spent a majority of the time processing the textual records of the collection, to
the detriment of the electronic records, the ramifications of which will be explored in the
following chapters. The research of the history of the collection as well as the necessary
information to create effective and logical records series was intensive, and each step of
43
Online Archive of California, “About OAC,” The California Digital Library, oac.cdlib.org.
18
the processing project required not only adherence and knowledge of the applicable principles, standards, and practices of archival theory, but also a working knowledge of the
procedures of the California State Archives and all the intricacies which go along with
them.44
Due to the nature of the records containing both textual and electronic materials,
the author took it upon himself to make sure that the textual records were processed thoroughly and effectively before examining the electronic records. Insofar as the Archives’
electronic records program is neither fully developed nor fully functional, the electronic
records of the COICC were not arranged and described to the extent found in practices
and protocols of professional standards. This has given the author a greater understanding of the intricacies and difficulties in processing collections with mixed forms of records, as well as a new resolve to carry what he has learned to future projects when and
where applicable.
Chapter 2
ELECTRONIC RECORDS
Digital, or electronic, records represent a vast and growing segment of archival
collections. Additionally, digital storage of archival records has evolved at a near overwhelming pace. The archival community has attempted to keep pace with the growth of
electronic records and formats, and has done so by crafting standards for digital records
collections and placing the development of archival practices for electronic records collections at the forefront of archival concerns. However, archival institutions are being
44
Metzer, “Processing Manual.”
19
rapidly outpaced by the growth of the digital community. Digital records thus remain
both a subject of increasing focus of archival programs as well as an ongoing concern.45
Electronic records can refer to two disparate concepts. The first is the digitization
or scanning of archival records, and the archival processing of electronic records; the latter is distinguished by the moniker “born digital records.” It is important to note that
while these two processes are overtly similar in a variety of ways, they remain fundamentally different in the approach that archivists must take in their management. The digitization of archival records, namely, paper documents or manuscripts, photographs, film or
audio recordings, is performed primarily as an addition to existing records.46 This is done
either to ensure continuity of the information contained in such analog records, or to aid
in the dissemination of such records through digital means. While this in itself is a
worthwhile goal of archives, it is not their primary concern; that is to say, it is superfluous in their mission to acquire records for preservation. Born digital records, on the other
hand, are of more pressing concern to institutions such as the California State Archives,
and will be the sole focus of this discussion. The acquisition and processing of “borndigital records” such as word processing files, email messages, hypertext webpages, and
databases, is the logical extension of an archives’ mission in the digital age. This process
has generated the most controversy, scholarship, and professional debate in recent
memory, and has produced both government and private-sector responses. Organizations
ranging from the RAND Corporation to the Online Computer Library Center to the NaRichard Pearce-Moses, “Janus in Cyberspace: Archives on the Threshold of the Digital Era,”
The American Archivist 70, no. 1, (Spring/Summer 2007), 13.
46
Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, 248.
45
20
tional Archives and Records Administration (NARA) have crafted working standards for
digital records.47
Preservation of Physical Media
In processing electronic records, one must be aware of two problems: physical
preservation and informational preservation. Informational preservation is defined as the
arrangement and description of the digital data itself, and will be addressed subsequently.
Physical preservation refers to the storage and arrangement of the physical media upon
which the digital data is encoded.48 We will first address the problems and statistics of
physical preservation before exploring the more complex problems of informational
preservation.
Archival storage of electronic records depends on the physical format of the storage medium. Digital records were first created during World War II in the 1940s, with
the invention of supercomputers such as ENIAC and UNIVAC used for the American
war effort.49 The first electronic records were stored on large metal cylinders known as
magnetic drum memory units, and held only a few dozen bytes worth of data.50 For the
first fifty years of electronic storage, magnetic encoding of digital data was the preferred
Nancy Kunde, “Getting it Done - Collaboration and Development of the Digital Records
Standard,” The American Archivist 72, no.1 (Spring/Summer 2009), 149-150
48
Gregory S. Hunter, Preserving Digital Information: A How-To-Do-It Manual (New York:
Neal Schumann Publishers, 2000), 4.
49
Michael Hally, Electronic Brains: Stories From the Dawn of the Computer Age (New York:
Joseph Henry Press, 2005), 12.
50
Hally, Electronic Brains, 13.
47
A byte is a string of eight bits, which is either a 1 or a 0. For magnetically encoded storage, a 1 is a
“written” space on the storage medium, a 0 is a blank space.
21
method of storing this information. Tape storage evolved in a succession of physical
formats, beginning with reel to reel tapes in the 1950s and 1960s in the age of supercomputers; the more compact cassette tapes in the 1970s were used for business and home
computing, and DAT (digital audio tapes) providing increases storage capacity for server
or backup use.51
Beginning with the “personal computer revolution” of the 1970s and 1980s, magnetic disks became a ubiquitous method of data storage, first in the form of 8-inch “minifloppies” and 5-and one-quarter inch “microfloppies.” These floppy disks could hold 400
kilobytes, or about 150 pages of text.52 High density 3-and one-half inch diskettes could
could could hold over 1 megabyte, or 500 pages of text. Soon larger metallic platters,
popularly known as “hard disks” became available to the consumer market, holding up to
10 megabytes by 1981, which meant that a single hard disk could store up to 10,000 pages of text. By 1991, the average hard disk size was 100 megabytes, by 2001, the average
hard disk size was 10 gigabytes (10,000 megabytes). By 2011, hard disks are commonly
1 terabyte (1,000,000 megabytes) or larger.53 This represents an exponential increase in
the storage capacity of electronic media, an increase with which archives are struggling to
keep pace. For example, the textual records of the Gray Davis administration contain
over 2,200 cubic feet of material, and the textual records of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
administration totaled 3,800 cubic feet. The electronic records of the Schwarzenegger
51
Michael Todd, Design Criteria Standard for Electronic Records Management Software Applications (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 19, 2002), 8-9.
52
Hally, Electronic Brains, 19.
53
Hally, Electronic Brains, 21.
22
administration, totaling nearly three terabytes of data, can fit on a hard disk less than the
size of a paperback novel.54 The problem remains that the time necessary to properly accession, let alone process these records, is dramatically higher.
Aside from magnetically encoded media, two other forms of media became popular in the 1990s and 2000s; compact discs and “flash” disks, respectively.55 The readonly compact disc, or CD-ROM, held 700 megabytes, and the eight-gigabyte DVDs
bridged the divide between high capacity storage and small physical footprint.56 NAND
or “flash” memory has, from its introduction in the early years of the 21st century, seen an
increase in storage capacity exponentially from less than 500 megabytes in 2001 to over
64 gigabytes by 2010.57 All of these different storage mediums have various challenges,
not only in terms of preservation of their physical structure and integrity of the data contained, but also in simply accessing the data.
If the State Archives were to seek to preserve data from one of the earliest digital
mainframe supercomputers from Livermore Laboratories, the archives would require either a working version of one of these computers, or a reverse-engineered magnetic drum
core reader. Either of these solutions would be cost-prohibitive to all but the most wellfunded of institutions. If on the other hand, the archives sought to preserve the data from
the Teale Data Center created within the last ten years, the hardware of the present day
54
Hally, Electronic Brains, 58.
Frederick J. Stielow, Building Digital Archives, Descriptions and Displays, (New York: Neal
Schumann Publishers, 2003), 31.
56
Hally, Electronic Brains, 59.
57
Elizabeth H. Dow, Electronic Records in the Manuscript Repository (New York: Scarecrow
Press, 2009), 103.
55
23
would easily be compatible. Ten years may be the most amount of time within which
hardware remains compatible, however.
Moore’s law, written in a 1965 white paper by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore,
states that the number of transistors which can fit on a microchip doubles every two
years.58 This means in essence that the raw power of any computer will roughly double
at the same rate. A computer in 2010 has on the order of 4 billion transistors; the computers of the year 2000 had only 100 million.59 By comparison, the computers of 1970
had roughly 2,000 transistors.60 These progressive increases in computing power have
necessitated shifts in computer hardware accordingly.
Archivists, then, are faced with two problems regarding computer hardware; 1.)
the ability of archives to interpret machine-readable storage media from past generations,
be they media magnetic tape, drum cylinders, DAT tapes, floppy disks, or CD-ROMs;
and 2.) the ability of archivists to preserve existing historic storage media, or to transfer
the data off such media to modern storage media. The first problem can be dealt with in
a self-contained solution of having the requisite hardware to decode the legacy media.
The obvious problem with this purported “solution” is the fact that any historic media is
subject to degradation over time, as much as any historic document or artifact, or more
so. However, due to the wide variety of storage media and the susceptibility to hazards
such as magnetic fields, the ability to preserve such media is often lost.
Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics
Magazine (April, 1965), 4.
59
Almon Cleggsan, “Moore’s Law,” E-Zine Articles (August 31, 2010).
60
Jonathan Rauch, “The New Old Economy: Computers and the Reinvention of the Earth,” The
Atlantic Monthly (January 2001).
58
24
Preservation of Digital Data
It is in these cases that software becomes a factor. The rapid-paced evolution of
computer hardware has been accompanied by an overwhelming diversity of computer
software. Given fifty companies each with a modern mainframe computer or server, one
will find forty-five different software databases in use, each incompatible with the others.
For example, the digital records of the California Occupational Information Coordinating
Committee contain three different proprietary databases; the Occupational Information
System Database developed by Pacific Research Management Associates in 1985, the
Labor Market Information database developed by a consulting firm in 1993, and the
Crosswalk database developed by the Employment Development Department concurrently with the LMI database.61
Problems such as this led to the supposition that the era from 1950 to an undetermined future date may one day be viewed as the “digital dark ages,” as coined by the International Federation of Library Associations at a conference in 1997.62 The diversity of
software applications used in creating digital records combined with the lack of any unified standard for preserving such records will leave future generations of historians and
archivists at a loss when attempting to reconstruct any data that may survive into the future. It is precisely this fear of losing our collective digital history that has prompted
61
Microfloppy Diskettes, The California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee,
Occupational Information Development Files, R189.07, California State Archives, Office of the Secr etary of State, Sacramento, California.
62
Margaret MacLean, Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity (The Getty Institute for
Conservation, 1999).
25
public and private agencies to craft standards aimed at mitigating and preventing data
loss. The U.S. Department of Defense and the National Archives, the University of British Columbia’s InterPARES Projects, and the Internet Archive have all crafted standards
and produced white papers which attempt to deal with the complexity of digital records
management.63
Even if we assume that the physical media and the data structure encoded on such
media is intact and preserved, the digital file structures may face several preservation
problems. The Online Computer Library Center’s three-point strategy for informational
preservation is concise. Digital preservation in this case must include:
• Assessing the risks for loss of content posed by technology variables
such as commonly used proprietary file formats and software applications.
• Evaluating the digital content objects to determine what type and degree
of format conversion or other preservation actions should be applied.
• Determining the appropriate metadata needed for each object type and
how it is associated with the objects, and providing access to the content.64
In order for the application of these standards to achieve relevance and practicality
among archivists, archivists must first have a working knowledge of both computer
hardware and computer software. Depending on the nature of the born digital records an
archive seeks to preserve, these two interrelated aspects could have far-reaching and expensive problems. The inability to access archival data, due either to lack of appropriate
hardware or software is known as “digital obsolescence.”65
63
Frank Boles, Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: The Society of
American Archivists, 2005), 121-135.
64
Todd, Design Criteria Standard, 9.
65
Jeff Rothenberg, Avoiding Technological Quicksand: Finding a Viable Technological Foundation for Digital Preservation, Council on Library and Information Resources (1998).
26
The Electronic Records Archives Program at the National Archives and Records
Administration is at a forefront of this movement to preserve digital history. As Kenneth
Thibodeau, the Director of the ERA program states:
NARA’s electronic records challenge is to preserve any type of record, created using any type of application, on any computer platform, by any entity
in the federal government, and to provide discovery and delivery of those
assets to anyone who has an interest in them. [...] And we have to do all that
now and for the life of the republic.66
This absolute mandate is daunting. While the areas identified by the National Archives
refer to problems of archiving Federal records, this can easily be extrapolated to address
the growing problems of attempting to accomplish the same for California government as
necessitated by the State Archives. The ERA has identified five fundamental factors
which affect the NARA’s ability to fulfill it’s mandate to preserve this information.
The first condition is the factor of scale; namely, that the amount of digital information being created by Federal agencies is growing at an expanding rate. This growth is
due in some part to the Mooreian growth of computing power, but is mainly due to the
expanding role of “e-government,” in which there is a shift of the bureaucracy from traditional formats to electronic formats.67
Second, the data being created by Federal agencies is diverse, both in its intrinsic
file format, as well as particular storage media.68 No two Federal agencies use the same
relational databases, nor do they store their information in the same media containers.
66
Kenneth Thibodeau, Preserving Electronic Records: Developments at the National Archives
and Records Administration, Long Term Preservation of Digital Archives (New York, May 19, 2004), 1.
67
Thibodeau, Preserving Electronic Records, 2.
68
Thibodeau, Preserving Electronic Records, 2.
27
While the State Department may use enterprise hard drives, NASA may prefer to use tape
backup drives.69 For the National Archives to effectively collect archival data, they must
be prepared to deal with a morass of formats which change at an increasing rate. The
third problem is that of sheer complexity of data. From the 1940s UNIVAC era computers through the 1970s and the “personal computer revolution,” the data being created by
these mainframes was relatively simple.70 Statistical data or numeric data sets comprised
most of the electronic records archived by NARA.
However, since the advent of the personal computer and the adoption of PCs by
Federal agencies, the data archived by NARA has become far more complex.71 Word
processing files to XML-encoded databases, large format PDF documents, digital images,
digital audio and video files, and GPS/Global Information Systems data files all require
exponentially larger storage space. Likewise, these files are not unified file formats, and
many have become obsolete within the past five years, widening the complexity of archiving them.72
The fourth and most troublesome issue faced by the NARA, and all other archives
as well, is that of data durability. No true “archival storage” medium exists for digital
records. Magnetic storage media, ubiquitous before the year 2000, is susceptible to corruption or complete erasure at even the slightest of magnetic fields. New storage media,
such as “optical” or “solid state” formats, have their own problems. Flash drives are sus69
Terry Kuny, “A Digital Dark Age? Challenges in the Preservation of Electronic Records,”
International Federation of Library Associations (August 27, 1997), 2.
70
Kuny, “ A Digital Dark Age,” 5.
71
Thibodeau, Preserving Electronic Records, 3.
72
Kuny, “A Digital Dark Age,” 11.
28
ceptible to memory wear, which could render the data inaccessible.73 Compact discs and
DVDs are susceptible to “disc rot,” or the literal breakdown of the material of the discs.
This leaves CDs and DVDs with a very short lifespan, anywhere from 1-15 years. While
there are “archival quality” discs available, many are very recent additions to the market.
These “archival” DVDs claim durability of 100 years or more, but currently are costprohibitive, and their integrity has not been approved by any agency for archival use.74
The last factor affecting the NARA’s archival practices is that of the changing nature of technology itself. As computers continue to double in raw power every two years,
new capabilities for the digitization of bureaucracy emerge. Twenty years ago, it would
have been impossible to have access to high resolution digital images available across the
internet; today, such access is status quo. As Thibodeau puts it:
While the core function of archives is to deliver evidence of the past to the
present and the future, we must anticipate that future users will want to use
the best technologies available for discovery, delivery and processing of
records of the past. The need to incorporate new technologies in digital
preservation creates an inherent tension with the goal of faithfully transmitting records of the past.75
This continual revolution through the evolution of technology prompts a shift in the fundamental perspective of archivists. While all archivists are concerned over the preservation of their information for future generations, archivists must now become active futurists, engaging their digital records in a way that will be sustainable and accessible for the
digital-native patrons of the near future.
Helen Heslop, et al. “An Approach to the Preservation of Digital Records” The National Archives of Australia (December 2003), 11.
74
Patrick McFarland, “How to Choose a CD/DVD Archival Media,” Free Software Magazine
(October 30, 2006).
75
Thibodeau, Preserving Electronic Records, 2.
73
29
Continuity of data in digital archives is achieved in one of two ways: software
emulation or software migration. NARA is currently addressing issues of data continuity
through a partnership with Lockheed-Martin.76 With a $308 million contract, Lockheed
has identified over 4,500 different types of computer files held in collections of the National Archives. Through software migration, these computer files will have their data
re-encoded by Lockheed’s software engineers into a long-term file format such as extensible markup language (XML), an open-source standard. This allows the authenticity of
digital records to be preserved when viewed on modern computers, while ensuring accessibility of the records through open standards like XML, which have the ability to adapt
to new changes in computer hardware.
Metadata
The role of metadata (or, the data about a particular data file) is key in determining digital authenticity.77 Metadata is defined as “a set of data which gives information
about other data.”78 More specifically, it refers to a specific section of an electronic document or file which contains information about the file such as file type, record creator,
date of creation, and the program used to create it. This information is contained within a
specially formatted section of a file, and while not always complete, is provides a way for
digital records to be organized, catalogued, and databased.
Brad Reagan, “The Digital Ice Age,” Popular Mechanics (December, 2006), 2.
Roe, Arranging and Describing Archives and Manuscripts, 138.
78
Erik Duval, et al “Metadata Principles and Practices,” D-Lib Magazine 8, no. 4 (April 2002), 3.
76
77
30
The University of British Columbia’s InterPARES working group has called for a
new standard in meta information for the benefit of establishing both archival authenticity
as well as categorization for electronic records. The MADRAS standard, or Metadata
and Archival Description Registry and Analysis System provides for both integrity and
transparency in the archival process. The importance of this system is described in the
MADRAS section of the working group’s report:
Contextual metadata documents circumstances relevant to the making of
the record: who, when, how, why. Efforts now being made to regularize
the process whereby knowledge of context is captured as metadata for
electronic record-keeping should not blind us to a fundamental truth. Because records themselves are time-bound, metadata must be verified within a context which is both current and historical. Records cannot remain
current unless the metadata is externally validated.79
This problem compounds the complexity of digital preservation. In order for a digital
record to be thoroughly authentic as well as thoroughly accessible, the encoded meta information must represent both the current state of the record, as well as any and all previous states from creation until processing by an institution.
Integrity and Authenticity
Authenticity in digital records is difficult to properly define. In a white paper
published by the RAND Corporation, digital preservationist Jeff Rothenberg argues that
hardware and software emulation is the most appropriate method for ensuring both the
authenticity and accessibility of digital records.80 States Rothenberg, software migration
79
Duranti, InterPares2, 270.
Jeff Rothenberg, Digital Preservation: The Uncertain Future of Saving the Past, RAND Europe (2008), 4.
80
31
“doesn't even try to save the original. What you end up with is somebody's idea about
what was important about the original.”81 While there are benefits to migration of data,
namely the ability to re-encode files in more open and accessible formats, the original
structure of the documents is lost. The question of whether authenticity in digital records
extends to original structure as well as content is a perpetual debate, and both sides in the
argument have merit. Frank Boles, director of Central Michigan University’s Clarke Historical Library, argues that “the farther that one moves away from being able to see the
data as it appeared to the record creator, the less evidential and valuable the record becomes.”82
The InterPARES project of the University of British Columbia, evocative of the
phrase primus inter pares or ‘first among equals,’ attempts to set international guidelines
for problems such as authenticity and obsolescence.83 The Project’s InterPARES2 report
is nearly 850 pages and contains reports on issues such as models for appraisal of digital
records, digital preservation, management of digital metadata, and the structure of relations between the creators of records and archivists.84 From 2002 through 2006, archivists and researchers from UBC formed working groups to explore and report on the subjects mentioned above. Each working group explored a particular aspect of electronic
records, incorporating existing scholarship and professional reports with hands-on study
and interaction with digital archives.
Reagan, “Digital Ice Age,” 2.
Boles, Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts, 128.
83
David Pogue, “Seeing Forever: TechnoFiles,” Scientific American (April 2011), 34.
84
Luciana Duranti and Randy Preston ed., InterPARES 2 Project: Experimental, Interactive,
and Dynamic Records (Padova, Italy: National Association of Italian Archivists, 2008), iii.
81
82
32
For the appraisal and preservation of digital records, the heart of digital archiving,
the InterPARES working group made the observation: “it is not possible to preserve a
digital record: it is only possible to preserve the ability to reproduce the record.”85 From
this, the group made the conclusion that:
The intellectual and physical components of a digital record do not necessarily coincide; a digital component is distinct from an element of documentary form. For example, the content of a record may include both text
contained in a word processing file and a table generated by spreadsheet
software. Technically, the text file may only contain a link to the spreadsheet file, which in turn may depend on the spreadsheet software rather
than word processing software to display it by recognizing and actualizing
formatting information.86
This duality of digital records deconstructs the archival meaning of the term “record” itself. While interrelated physical records are kept in a record group, any singular electronic document might contain multiple records within it, each requiring a different piece of
software to reproduce.
In a study conducted by the Masters of Archival Studies program at the University of British Columbia, researchers created integral definitions for digital records. Graduate researchers Luciana Duranti and Heather MacNeil defined a digital record in terms
similar to that of records of other media, that is, by a system of formal elements, and not
simply for the information it may contain. They wrote that a record is composed of several key facets, including physical form, data structure, and other parts:
medium (the physical carrier or container for the message)
form (the rules of representation that allow for the communication of the
message)
85
86
Duranti, InterPARES 2 Project, 164.
Duranti, InterPARES 2 Project, 164.
33
context (the juridical-administrative framework in which the action takes
place)
archival bond (the relationship that links each record to the previous and
subsequent one and to all those which participate in the same activity)
and content (the message that the record is intended to convey).87
This complex nature of digital records allows for a more in-depth understanding of their
creation and preservation. These criteria: medium, form, context, bond, and content, allow archivists first and foremost to distinguish digital records from other digital information, and more importantly, to set a threshold or “bright line” during the accessioning
process. The evaluation and selection of digital records for preservation is not an easy
task, but through the understanding of the criteria set forth by the University of British
Columbia study, this task becomes easier. Duranti and MacNeil subsequently describe
that appraisal can be broken down by the categories listed above.
For issues of storage media, the threshold itself is fairly low. The physical integrity of the medium is most important; any cracks, chips, dust, or magnetic flaws are present, can be cause for loss of the digital information, usually without further recourse.
Since the particular medium holds no evidentiary or informational value in and of itself,
it is essentially interchangeable. Duranti writes that:
The preservation of electronic records requires repeated and continuing
reproduction…because the medium of electronic records is not imbued
with meaning, each record reproduction in which only the component that
changes is the medium can be taken to be a complete record identical to
the one that it reproduces.88
Luciana Duranti and Heather MacNeil, “The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records:
An Overview of the University of British Columbia Masters of Archival Science Research Project”(Abstract, 1995), 49.
88
Duranti and MacNeil, “The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records,” 49.
87
34
The encoded data must then be evaluated according to its physical form. This refers to
the form the digital information takes when decoded using technology appropriate to its
encoding. The form includes type, fonts, formatting, colors, attachments, image files
such as logos or emblems, the software architecture, operating system, and metadata such
as time-stamps or version information.89 When the technology with which the record was
designed becomes obsolete, the choices, besides retaining the original hardware, are emulation, virtualization, or migration, discussed earlier. According to Duranti, any change
in the physical form, or file structure, of a record results in a new and different record.
She writes that “after migration, the resulting records may look like the ones that have
been migrated, their physical form has substantially changed, with loss of information on
the one hand, and addition of new information on the other hand.”90
This means that the authenticity of the digital records can never be truly static;
each record must be evaluated according to its individual situation. Duranti writes that
this process of migration must be “self-authenticating” -- that is, the process of migrating
a record keeps the migrated version as an authentic record equal to the original in terms
of value.91 The fact that this information remains contained within the record is the key
difference separating electronic records from textual records: the information about the
data is contained within the data.92 Such metadata and identifying information, including
form and file structure, would be lost if digital records were to be transferred onto a more
Duranti and MacNeil, “The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records,” 50.
Duranti and MacNeil, The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records,” 53.
91
Duranti and MacNeil, The Protection of the Integrity of Electronic Records,” 54.
92
Erik Duval, et al “Metadata Principles and Practices,” 3.
89
90
35
stable physical mediums such as bonded archival paper. The loss of informational value
would destroy the authenticity of the records and render them worthless to the researcher.
Electronic Records Program
The California State Archives has focused on a limited scope for preservation of
digital records. Aside from digitizing a small amount of textual and audiovisual records
for use in their MINERVA online catalog and database of collection finding aids based
on the GENCAT database, the Archives does not perform item-level processing of electronic records. The Electronic Records Task Force, charged by state archivist Nancy Z.
Lenoil with crafting the archives’ electronic records policy, meets monthly. Composed
of archivists Rebecca Wendt, Jeffrey Crawford, IT support person Breanne Cato, and
graduate intern Lisa DeHope, the task force has purview over electronic records considerations not already handled by the Secretary of State’s IT division.93
Several options are being considered by the task force for implementation in order
to process currently held and future incoming electronic records. The primary focus is on
a unified and centralized system for processing incoming records of state agencies and of
Governor Schwarzenegger’s administration, which will use script-based RSS (Really
Simple Syndication) services to download records posted to the websites of state agencies. The task force is also exploring use of an off-site vendor for processing and storage
of electronic data. One possibility includes Iron Mountain, a for-profit data storage com-
93
2010.
Electronic Records Task Force, California State Archives, email to author, November 2,
36
pany, which proposed a virtual digital environment to preserve the informational value of
the archives’ digital holdings.94
Archives’ IT support person Breanne Cato recently oversaw the acquisition and
installation of a “clean” PC running Windows XP service pack 3. The “clean” computer
has limited intranet access, and has the majority of its network transmission control ports
(TCP), and universal datagram packet (UDP) ports blocked, allowing an environment in
which electronic records can be safely explored and described without fear of virus contamination or the modification of their original order -- namely, the digital file structures.95 During the first trial run of the clean machine, Cato and this author examined two
3.5” floppy diskettes from the COICC collection. The first contained a portable document format (PDF) file written using Adobe Acrobat 1.01, a piece of software from 1994
with an expected operational lifetime of just six months. The file was uncorrupted, and
opened flawlessly, displaying both the text of the PDF as well as the intact metadata.96
The second disk contained a DOS executable file. When the author and Cato ran
the program, a blank database document was created on the original disk; the author surmises this to be the original purpose of the program. Unfortunately, this modification of
the disk’s file structure to include a new file dating to 2010 negatively affected the authenticity of the disk, and changed the original order of the data. While this problem may
be rendered moot by an eventual migration or virtualization of the program, this mistake
94
95
Electronic Records Task Force, California State Archives, Minutes, November 8 th, 2010.
Technical Memorandum, Office of the Secretary of State, Information Technology Division,
n.d.
96
California Micro Occupational Information System, The California Occupational Information
Coordinating Committee, Occupational Information Development Files, R189.07, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
37
highlighted an important necessity: until a unified standard for digital processing, all
disks should be write-protected before being explored in an archival setting on the clean
computer, so as to avoid further compromising the authenticity and informational value
of the data stored on them.
The State Archives policy on electronic records is still undergoing significant and
dramatic changes. While the electronic records task force has met with several vendors
for remote storage and digital preservation in the form of hardware migration and software emulation, the lack of requisite funding has limited the Task Force’s ability to produce meaningful results. The official guidelines for the processing of electronic records
call for an extremely limited description during processing, and preservation limited to
low-temperature storage in the Archives “Z” vault.97
The electronic records of the COICC which the author sought to explore using
professional standards for digital media were thus left largely unprocessed. With the exception of 3 ½” diskettes, the majority of records on 5 ¼” diskettes could not be described according to their content. Rather, they were described only according to their
physical label. These electronic records were placed in climate-controlled low temperature storage with the hope that eventual adoption of a uniform digital record policy by the
State Archives would allow these and other electronic records to be sufficiently arranged
and described for access by researchers.
The State Archives’ Electronic Records Task Force continues to meet and discuss
the future of electronic records at the Archives. While it remains unclear if and when the
97
Metzer, “Processing Manual.”
38
State Archives will adopt an electronic records policy, there is no guarantee that even if
digital records are preserved that access will be given to the public in any manner different than it is given for textual records. The great potential for the electronic records of
the State of California to be accessed by hundreds if not thousands of researchers per year
is limited by the potential policy for access that the Archives may adopt in the future.Chapter 3
FINDINGS
From inception to final completion, the processing of the records of the California
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee took over six months. The author
began this project in October 2010, without prior knowledge of the extent of the undertaking. Investigation into the agency history and the many state and federal legislative
and structural changes that the COICC experienced in its twenty-seven year history
proved intensive and time consuming.98 The processing plan for the records as originally
created, with access only to a basic records retention schedule and the limited description
of records series as understood by the accessioning archivists over a period of a decade or
more, differed significantly from the size and arrangement of the collection at the time of
the final completion of their processing.
Arranging and describing the records, particularly in reducing the overall volume
of the collection from nearly fifty-two cubic feet to just over thirteen cubic feet, including
electronic resources, posed a significant challenge to the author. The lack of logical ar-
98
Guide to the California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee Records, R189.01R189.12., California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California, 2011.
39
rangement of the records, both within and across the four separate accessions (and thus
the lack of original order to the records) meant that the author’s definitions of series for
the records was an ongoing process during the arrangement of the records.
Findings
With respect to the subjects covered by the records of the COICC, the author began this project with a limited knowledge of labor market information, as well as the context of the labor information dissemination, employment training, and vocational education as it existed both at the national level and within California between 1975 and
2005.99 The evolution of the COICC from the passage of the Comprehensive Employment Training Act of 1973 and the creation of the National Occupational Information
Coordinating Committee through the establishing legislation in California in the statutes
of 1975 in the Education Code, was complex. Tracing this history through the reforms of
the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education act of 1984 and the shift of statutory authority for the COICC from the California Education Code to the Unemployment
Insurance Code proved challenging due to the changing and evolving elements of the
governing statutory authority.
The NOICC was defunded in 2000 and America’s Career Resource Network was
subsequently established. At this same time the COICC continued to operate through
federal Perkins Act funding until being dissolved in 2005. Senate Bill 655, introduced by
Senator Migdin, replaced the title and functions of the COICC with the California Career
H. H. Splete and J. Hoppin, “The Emergence of Career Development Facilitators,” Career Development Quarterly 48 (December 2000), 341.
99
40
Resource Network. To the author, this history gave the records of the COICC a very definite context, well-placed within the national theatre of events.100
The records series varied from correspondence to subject files to budget reports.
Correspondence seemed the largest series, as it included mail from the COICC staff to
member agencies, from agencies working with the COICC to one another, from the executive director to the COICC board, from the COICC to other State Occupational Information Coordinating Committees and the National Committee, and from the COICC to
vendors, schools, Private Industry Councils, and labor market information test sites.101
Memoranda files were similar, but included information between COICC staff members
and the executive director. Files on labor market and occupational conferences and on
subjects related to labor market information development were also found. Reports of the
committee to the legislature, the NOICC, and the general public took up a smaller amount
of space than anticipated. The Occupational Outlook Reports, which the COICC was
created to compile and distribute, were not completed until 2000 to 2004 and only included half of California’s counties.102
The author was given broad authority over what was to be considered a record of
“enduring value,” and subsequently the collection was reduced by 75 percent. A majority
of the records not retained for the collection were blank, duplicates, or redundant. The
100
SB665, California Career Resource Network, Chapter 208, Statutes of 2005.
Correspondence Files, Guide to the California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee Records, R189.03, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, California, 2011.
102
Occupational Outlook Reports, Report Files, Guide to the California Occupational Information
Coordinating Committee Records, R189.08 and R189.11. California State Archives, Office of the Secretary
of State, Sacramento, California, 2011.
101
41
remainder of the records removed from the collection included personally identifiable
information on parties not related to the scope of the collection, budgetary allocation and
funding reports, and interagency correspondence and memoranda without any long term
value to researchers. Best practices for archives, as well as the Society of American Archivists’ Code of Ethics mandates that records be appraised with impartial judgement.103
The author felt that to be completely impartial was to ignore the broader context of the
records and their place both within occupational information history and the history of
California labor markets, but appraised the records within the collection as objectively as
possible.
The myriad of problems of the electronic portion of the COICC’s records, not
simply due to the broader problems of electronic records processing, but specifically the
shortcomings of the California State Archives, presented the author with both a mounting
challenge and valuable insight as to the function of large archives without existing electronic records management programs. The difficulty posed by even identifying the subjects of electronic records, especially those of such disparate formats from 5 ¼” floppy
diskettes to Video-CDs, was significant.
It was not until the State Archives installed a “clean machine” that the author
could even examine the electronic records; and even then only the 3 ½” diskettes and
CD-ROMs were accessible. Despite several conversations with the State Archivist Nancy Z. Lenoil, the Archives never officially received the capacity to read electronic records
on 5 ¼” disks. The only other possibility would have been removing duplicate 5 ¼”
103
Hunter, Developing and Maintaining Practical Archives, 382.
42
disks from the collection to be read on a private machine, but this would violate both Archives’ policy and the Society of American Archivists’ code of ethics by removing records. To remove any records, even duplicates, from the building would have been significantly inappropriate.
Notably, the electronic records contained on both 5 ¼” and 3 ½” floppy disks included not just data, but original programs as well. The development of an Occupational
Information System by Pacific Research Management Associates for 1984-1985 spanned
over seven disks for each of three different versions. Access to these records will be severely limited for researchers, as the majority remain on as-yet unreadable 5 ¼” disks.
The remainder, on 3 ½” floppies, will remain in the Archives’ cold storage vault, and will
not be migrated or virtualized on any accessible servers. While the possibility exists that
data contained on the several compact discs could be migrated to the Archives’ servers,
the likelihood that this digital information will be made available to researchers or
through the internet to the general public is currently minimal at best.
Conclusions
The problems of electronic records at the State Archives can be compounded by
the general difficulties of processing a collection without defined arrangement. While the
author brought a working knowledge both about digital information systems and information management, as well as standards and practices of archival theory, the task of
processing the collection proved to be substantial and time-consuming. It is hoped that
the rewards gained in terms of experience and contribution to future researchers are valu-
43
able, as is the importance of knowing how to implement the theories behind the arrangement and description of archival records.
The processing of the records of the California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee illustrates some practical realities of working with electronic records in
an institution not currently set up to effectively ingest and disseminate them for researchers and the general public. It is the author’s hope that this process may serve to better the
understanding of any, be they record creators, archivists, researchers, or interested citizens, who interact with electronic records. The state of electronic records at the California State Archives, like those of any archives, is one of slow progress. While the path to
effective electronic records management may not be straightforward, quick, or easily
traversed, it is there. Archival institutions are already on this path, they need only to continue moving forward towards the digital future.APPENDIX A
Inventory of the Records of
the Occupational Information Coordinating
Committee
Inventory of the COICC Records
1978-2004
44
California State Archives
Office of the Secretary of State
Sacramento, California
Contact Information
California State Archives
1020 O Street
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: (916) 653-2246
FAX: (916) 653-7363
E-mail: ArchivesWeb@sos.ca.gov
URL: http://www.sos.ca.gov/archives/
Records processed by Tyler G. Cline
Date Completed: May 2011
© 2010 California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State. All rights reserved.
Descriptive Summary
Title
Records of the Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Collection Number
R189
Creator
California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Extent
13 Cubic feet
45
Repository
California State Archives
Office of the Secretary of State
Sacramento, California
Administrative Information
Publication Rights
For permission to reproduce or publish, please consult California State Archives staff.
Permission for reproduction or publication is given on behalf of the California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, as the owner of the physical items.
The researcher assumes all responsibility for possible infringement that may arise from
reproduction or publication of materials from the California State Archives’ collections.
Preferred Citation
[Identification of item], Occupational Information Coordinating Committee Records,
R189. [series number], [box & folder number], California State Archives, Office of the
Secretary of State, Sacramento, California.
Restrictions
Records are open for research.
Agency History
The California Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (COICC) was created
by an act of the State Legislature in response to the national Comprehensive Employment
Training Act of 1973, or CETA. That act was passed by the 93rd Congress and chaptered
as Public Law 93-203. The federal act created the National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (NOICC) as a federal level interagency committee with consolidated responsibilities for funding federal job training programs, for the unemployed, underemployed, the disadvantaged, and youth. The NOICC coordinated with state level
Occupational Information Coordinating Committees or SOICCs, and distributed block
grants and the Basic Assistance Grants to state level programs which met the NOICC’s
developmental guidelines.
46
The COICC (alternately referred to as the California SOICC) was established by Statutes
of 1975, Chapter 853. The Committee consisted of the Director of Employment Development, the Director of Commerce, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, the Director of Rehabilitation, the chair of
the State Job Training Coordinating Council, the Executive Director of the Employment
Training Panel, the Director of Social Services, and the Executive Secretary of the Council for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education. The goal of the committee was
to act as an advisory body to the Employment Development Department in the department's operation of the State-Local Cooperative Labor Market Information Development
Program, or LMID, as specified in the above mentioned federally funded program requirements.
The scope and mission of the COICC was modified several times after its inception.
Chapter 972, Statutes of 1978, stated that the Legislature’s intent for the COICC was to
make “timely labor market information” available to the public. Revised federal legislation such as the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982 provided funding through the
NOICC for state level OICCs to fund job corps, adult and youth education programs, and
labor market information statistics gathering, publishing, and promulgation.
The national Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act of 1984 restructured the NOICC/SOICC relationship by providing funding and mandates for the creation
of technical and vocational education programs. The COICC was encouraged to sponsor
and track the successes of vocational programs in California. In 1984, the authorizing
legislation granting the COICC statutory authority was shifted from the Education code
to the unemployment insurance code. The COICC was defined as an interagency committee in the Unemployment Insurance Code sections 10531 and 10532, with the same language, structure, and board composition as the previous statutes of 1978.
During this time, the COICC, which had a full-time staff of two and one half persons,
began efforts to promulgate labor market information for California. The COICC chose a
distributed model for this information, facilitating coordination between the California
State College system and the Private Industry Councils of major California cities such as
San José, Fresno, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego.
In 1998 the committee became part of America’s Career Resource Network as funded
under the Workforce Investment Act. The committee was restructured in 2005, following
the passage of SB655 (Midgin), which repealed the Unemployment Insurance Code sections 10531 and 10532, replacing them with Education Code section 53086 (Chapter 208,
Statutes of 2006). The committee was renamed the California Career Resource Network
and became a special program within the Department of Education.
The members now included the Director of Employment Development, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, the
47
Director of Rehabilitation, the Director of Social Services, the Executive Director of the
California Workforce Investment Board, the Chief Deputy of the Adult Programs Division, Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the Chief Deputy of the Juvenile Justice Division, Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, and the Director of the Department of Developmental Services.
The program then had the goal to distribute career information, resources, and training
materials to middle school and high school counselors, educators, and administrators, in
order to ensure that middle schools and high schools have the necessary information
available to provide a pupil with guidance and instruction on education and job requirements necessary for career development.
Scope and Content
The records of the Occupational Information Coordinating Committee (COICC) consist
of thirteen cubic feet of textual records and one box of electronic media. These records
are arranged into twelve series and date from 1978 to 2004. The series arrangement reflects an imposition of an artificial arrangement structure onto records which were organized neither chronologically nor by subject. Records were stored in folders with limited
description, and organization was imposed on these folders.
The records between the creation of the COICC in 1978 and the passage of the Job Training Partnership Act in 1982 and the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education
Act in 1984 are sparse and reflect a lack of direction within the COICC. Despite having a
mandate from the state to propagate labor market information and funding to do so, the
records of the COICC from this period display both lack of consensus as to the COICC’s
mission as well as the methods through which such mission was to be accomplished.
Beginning in 1982, the COICC undertook a study of the usefulness of Labor Market Information (LMI) within the state, contracted to Pacific Research Management Associates
of Sacramento. This group developed three versions of a Labor Market Information Survey, to be distributed electronically on microfloppy diskette for MS-DOS computers.
The survey was distributed to Private Industry Councils of San Jose and San Diego, as
well as several colleges and universities. Despite spending several years and many thousands of dollars on the survey project, the COICC would not effectively distribute Labor
Market Information within and about the state for another decade.
Beginning in the late 1990s, the COICC began to distribute Occupational Outlook Reports for the counties of California on an annual basis. These reports were distributed in
bound volumes as well as electronic format as Adobe PDF files.
48
The records of the COICC reflect shifting trends in both the labor market and labor market information over a period of twenty-five years. In the late 1990s, the Committee’s
memoranda and interagency correspondence reflected the growing realization that the
changing realities of labor in California and the Untied States meant that as companies
shifted their workforces towards “mobile” more temporary employees, the ability for
agencies to track labor market information, as well as the relevance and timeliness of labor market information, was significantly decreased.
By the year 2000, the National Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
(NOICC) had its statutory language revoked, and was replaced by America’s Career Resource Network (ACRN), with a focus on employment education for high school students
and retraining for people changing careers. The COICC continued to produce and distribute Occupational Outlook Reports up until its restructuring as the California Career Resource Network (CalCRN) in 2005.
Series Description
1. Agency Files. 1982-1990. 9 file folders. R189.01. Box 1, folders 1 – 9.
Arranged alphabetically by agency name.
Agency files include material relating to the various agencies with which the COICC had
a relationship. These include the Employment Development Department, the Department
of Education, and the California Community Colleges. Agency files include materials
such as interagency agreements and budgetary information.
2. Conference Files. 1996-2002. 8 file folders. R189.02. Box 1, folders 10 – 17.
Arranged chronologically.
This series contains material related to conferences attended by COICC members. They
COICC attended numerous conferences between the inception of the Committee and its
disbandment. The COICC also sponsored and hosted conferences in California related to
labor market information, labor statistics development, and workforce information. Materials include promotional material, research material, remarks, and correspondence with
conference members or hosts.
3. Correspondence. 1982-2003. 60 file folders. R189.03. Box 1, folder 18 – Box 4,
folder 4.
49
Arranged into two subseries. The first subseries covers the years 1982 to 1986, and is arranged chronologically. The second subseries covers the years 1983 to 2003, and is arranged alphabetically by subject.
Correspondence files include letters and emails from the COICC, its executive directors,
and its advisory members to and from various agencies, legislators, researchers, consultants, and members of the private sector, both citizens and industry leaders. The COICC
also had correspondence with the National Occupational Coordinating Committee on
matters of policy, procedure, funding, and scope.
4. Meeting Files. 1979-2002. 43 file folders. R189.04. Box 4, folder 5 – Box 5, folder 23.
Arranged into two subseries: (1) Meeting Agendas and Minutes, and (2) General Meeting
Files. Meeting agendas and minutes are arranged by date, and general meeting files are
arranged by subject.
The first subseries includes agendas and minutes from meetings of the full Committee
including advisory members and general staff. These meetings typically occurred on a
monthly basis, but were frequently postponed or cancelled. The second subseries included meeting notes and reference material. Topics discussed at the COICC meetings include the directorship of the Committee, the workforce development block grant program, labor market information, the Joint Employment Training Conference of 1992, and
cooperation with other State Occupational Information Coordinating Committees.
5. Memoranda. 1989-2002. 34 file folders. R189.05. Box 6, folder 1 – Box 7, folder
11.
Arranged alphabetically by subject.
The COICC staff included the executive director and one to three staff assistants at any
given time, and correspondence between the staff and the full body of the Committee was
often the best way for these two groups to communicate. As the COICC met monthly
and frequently cancelled or postponed meetings, memoranda between the executive director and members of the Committee allowed for the free flow of information and ideas
to develop projects and continue the general functions of the committee.
6. Office Files. 1981-1999. 11 file folders. R189.06. Box 7, folders 12 – 22.
Arranged alphabetically by subject.
Office files include material from the day-to-day operations of the COICC staff, which
included an executive director and at least one support person. The correspondence and
materials of the executive director is included.
50
7. OIS Development Files. 1980-2002. R189.07. Box 7, folder 23 – Box 9, folder 25.
Arranged alphabetically by subject.
The development of a California Cooperative Occupational Information System (CCOIS)
was a fundamental goal of the COICC. The OIS Development Files include reports, research, and background information on the development of the CCOIS. From the creation of the Committee through the late 1990s, this system was never fully developed or
implemented. The COICC contracted with Pacific Research Management Associates in
1983-1985 to develop a comprehensive survey meant to gauge the interest of the public
and private sectors in participating in the CCOIS, but participation was low. These files
include research and correspondence between PRMA and the COICC members, user
manuals for the Labor Market Information Survey, and digital media including three versions of the LMIS on 5 ¼” diskette. The COICC attempted to coordinate a distributed
Occupational Information System by making it voluntary and industry-led, but by 1995 it
had returned to a centralized CCOIS concept.
For a complete description of OIS media, see Appendix A.
8. Outlook Reports. 18 file folders. 1982-2004. R189.08. Box 10, folders 1 – 18.
Arranged alphabetically by county.
The Occupational Outlook Reports cover a wide variety of labor market information in
several regions in California, usually separated by County. For the first decade of these
reports, the information is scattered and not uniform. However, reports included after
1995, both electronically and in textual format are both comprehensive and uniform. The
reports included are primarily from 2001-2003 and include multi-year projections by the
counties.
For a complete description of report titles, see Appendix B.
9. Program Files. 7 file folders. 1986-1988. R189.09. Box 10, folder 19 – Box 11,
folder 4.
Arranged alphabetically by program.
Program files include material both on the programs developed by the COICC as well as
programs led by private industry council, for-profit groups, other SOICCs, and the
NOICC. These include printed and promotional material, correspondence to and from
these groups, and feedback on the COICC’s programs such as the Cooperative Occupational Information System. Programs managed by the COICC included the Labor Market
Information Technical Guide program, the Occupational Handbook Workshop Guide, the
51
guide to the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, and the distribution of research on paths
to entering the workplace.
10. Project Files. 10 file folders. 1987-1995. R189.10. Box 11, folders 5 – 14.
Arranged alphabetically by project.
Project files include documentation on the various tasks which the COICC performed,
including preparation for conferences, development of strategies to fulfill its mandate of
labor market dissemination, and the creation of guides to career development training.
Some projects included finding local partners for the California Cooperative Information
System, the Career Development Training Guide, and the Vocational Training Wage Data project.
11. Report Files. 15 file folders. 1978-2004. R189.11. Box 11, folder 15 – Box 12,
folder 6.
Arranged alphabetically by subject.
Reports created or retained by the COICC including those on labor market information,
career development training, career reeducation and workforce adjustment, workforce
development, and vocational and technical education.
12. Subject Files. 26 file folders. 1988-2002. R189.12. Box 12, folder 7 – Box 13,
folder 9.
Arranged alphabetically by subject.
Subject files span a wide array of topics of interest or use to the COICC and typically
consist of correspondence, background material, newspaper clippings, notes, reports, legislation, and educational tools. Some subjects of specific interest to the COICC are
SB178 (1983-1984) which reauthorized the COICC with a mandate for labor market information gathering and distribution, the Carl D. Perkins Act for Vocational and Technical Education of 1984, which contained information similar to SB178 on the federal
level, the COICC’s distribution of the “California Career Video” series, and the Real
Game/Make It Real Game for use in the public school system at differing grade levels.
For a complete description of subject headings, see Appendix C.Appendix
A:
OIS Development Files, Electronic Media
Media Type Description
Location
52
5 1/4” Disk
1992 State Training Inventory. 2 disks.
Z59
5 1/4” Disk
1993 State Training Inventory. 2 disks.
Z59
5 1/4” Disk
1994 State Training Inventory. 2 disks
Z59
5 1/4” Disk
Labor Supply Survey Kit. Version 1.0. 6 disks.
Z59
5 1/4” Disk
Labor Supply Survey Kit. Version 2.0. 8 disks.
Z59
5 1/4” Disk
Labor Supply Survey Kit. Version 3.0. 12 disks.
Z59
5 1/4” Disk
Pacific Management Development. 4 disks.
Z59
5 1/4” Disk
Survey Handbook. 8 disks.
Z59
5 1/4” Disk
COICC/NOICC Training Module. 10 disks.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
1993 State Training Inventory. 2 disks.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
1994 State Training Inventory. 2 disks.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
1995 State Training Inventory. 2 disks.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
1996 State Training Inventory. 9 disks.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
California Job Prospects. 1 disk. 1998.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
COICC Lesson Guide (WordPerfect). 1 disk. 2001.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
CCOIS Marketing Brochure. 2 disks.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
Spectrum Job Search System. Version 1.0. 13 disks.
1991.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
ERISS. Version 4.0 15 disks. 1995.
Z59
53
3 1/2” Disk
Monterey Outlook Report (PDF). 1 disk. 1995.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
Mother Lode Outlook Report (PDF). 1 disk. 1995.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
San Francisco Outlook Report (PDF). 1 disk. 1995.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
San Luis Obispo Outlook Report (PDF). 1 disk. 1995.
Z59
3 1/2” Disk
Sacramento Outlook Report (PDF). 1 disk. 1996.
Z59
CD-ROM
COICC logo (Adobe Illustrator). 1 disc. 2001.
Z59
CD-ROM
COICC banner (Adobe Illustrator). 1 disc. 2001.
Z59
CD-ROM
Golden State Career Videos. 1 disc. 2001.
Z59
CD-ROM
Labor Market Training Provider Information. 1 disc.
2001.
Z59
Videocassette
“Career Counseling in California: The New Agenda.”
1994.
Z59
Appendix B: Occupational Outlook Reports
Date
Description
Identification #
2002-2003 Alameda County
Box 10/7
2003-2004 Alpine, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, and Sierra Counties
Box 10/7
2003
Box 10/7
Fresno
2000-2002 Humboldt
Box 10/8
2001-2003 Humboldt
Box 10/8
54
2000-2002 Mother Lode Consortium
Box 10/9
2001-2003 Mother Lode Consortium
Box 10/9
2003-2004 North Central Counties: Colusa, Glen, Lake, Sutter, Yuba Box 10/10
2002-2003 NorTec Region
Box 10/11
2002
Box 10/11
Orange
2000-2001 Sacramento
Box 10/12
2003
Box 10/13
San Diego
2000-2002 San Luis Obispo
Box 10/13
2003
San Mateo
Box 10/14
2002
Santa Clara
Box 10/15
2003
Santa Clara
Box 10/16
2004
Shasta
Box 10/16
2002-2003 Stanislaus
Nox 10/17
2003-2004 Stanislaus
Box 10/17
2003-2004 Ventura
Box 10/18
Appendix C: Subject Files
Date
Subject
Identification #
1995
Career Counseling for Change (1ff)
Box 12/7
55
2001
Career Videos (5ff)
Box 12/8 – Box 12/12
1998-1999
Employment Development, Department of. (2ff)
Box 12/13 – Box
12/14
1999-2000
Employment Training (1ff)
Box 12/15
1994
Higher Education (3ff)
Box 12/16 – Box
12/18
1982-1983
Job Training Partnership Act (1ff)
Box 12/19
1998-1999
Kaleidoscope (1ff)
Box 12/20
1992
Labor Market Information (1ff)
Box 12/21
1999
Make it Real Game (1ff)
Box 12/22
2002
Perkins Act (2ff)
Box 13/1 – Box 13/2
2002-2003
The Real Game (1ff)
Box 13/3
1983-1984
SB 178 (1983-1984) (2ff)
Box 13/4 – Box 13/5
1994
State Job Training Coordinating Council (1ff)
Box 13/6
1998
State Plan for Higher Education (1ff)
Box 13/7
1990-1992
Telecommunications (1ff)
Box 13/8
1994
Unemployment Information (1ff)
Box 13/9
APPENDIX B
Sample Processing PlanProcessing Plan Worksheet
Collection Name:
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
56
Accession Numbers:
1998-07-10; 1998-11-35; 2002-198; 2006-090
Total Volume:
52.0 cubic feet
Organization:
Office files, subject files, correspondence, publications,
reports.
Types of Materials:
Textual and electronic.
Primary Subjects:
Interagency correspondence, conference information, The
Make It Real Game, meeting information, county Occupational Outlook Reports.
Physical Condition:
Good.
Restrictions:
.
None – open for research.
Dates: 1978-2004
Record Units:
Correspondence Files
Meeting Files
Memoranda Files
OIS Development Files
Report Files
Conference Files
Subject Files
(1994-1996)
(1983-2000)
(1983-1993)
(1981-1989)
(2000-2004)
(1996-2001)
(1982-1996)
Date Assigned:
10/01/2010
Revised 3/20/11
Processing Archivist:
2 cf
4 cf
2 cf
3 cf
3 cf
2 cf
1 cf
Tyler G. ClineAPPENDIX C
Sample Catalog Cards
57
OCCUPATIONAL INFORMATION COORDINATING COMMITTEE
LOCATION
DESCRIPTION
DATE
AGENCY FILES
1982-1990
Dxxxx
R198.01
Box 1/1 – Box 1/9
R189.02
CONFERENCE FILES
1996-2002
Box 1/10 – Box 1/17
R189.03
CORRESPONDENCE FILES
1982-2003
Box 1/18 – Box 4/4
OCCUPATIONAL See
INFORMATION
COMMITTEE
Master Finding AidCOORDINATING
for Details
LOCATION
DESCRIPTION
DATE
MEETING FILES
1979-2002
Dxxxx
R189.04
Box 4/5 – Box 5/23
R189.05
MEMORANDA FILES
1989-2002
Box 6/1 – Box 7/11
R189.06
OFFICE FILES
Box 7/12 – Box 7/22
See Master Finding Aid for Details
1981-1999
58
OCCUPATIONAL INFORMATION COORDINATING COMMITTEE
LOCATION
DESCRIPTION
DATE
OIS DEVELOPMENT FILES
1980-2002
Dxxxx
R189.07
Box 7/23 – Box 9/25
R189.08
OUTLOOK REPORTS
1982-2004
Box 10/1 – Box 10/18
R189.09
PROGRAM FILES
1986-1988
Box 10/19 – Box 11/4
OCCUPATIONAL See
INFORMATION
COMMITTEE
Master Finding AidCOORDINATING
for Details
LOCATION
DESCRIPTION
DATE
PROJECT FILES
1987-1995
Dxxxx
R189.10
Box 11/5 – Box 11/14
R189.11
REPORT FILES
1984-2002
Box 11/15 – Box 12/6
R189.12
SUBJECT FILES
Box 12/7 – Box 13/10
See Master Finding Aid for Details
1988-2002
59
APPENDIX D
Sample Box Labels
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.01 - R189.03
Occupational Info Coordinating Committee
Agency Files (1982-1990)
Conference Files (1996-2002)
Correspondence Files (1982-2003)
1982-2003
Loc: D4482Box
1
of
13
27173
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.09-R189.11
Occupational Info Coordinating Committee
Program Files (1986-1988)
Project Files (1987-1995)
Report Files (1984-2002)
1986-2002
Loc: D4485Box 11
of
13
27183
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.03
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Correspondence Files (1996-2002)
1996-2002
Loc: D4483Box
3
of
13
27175
60
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.04
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Meeting Files (1979-2002)
1979-2002
Loc: D4483Box
5
of
13
27177
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.07
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
OIS Development Files (1980-2002)
1980-2002
Loc: D4484Box
8
of
13
27180
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.08-R189.09
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Outlook Reports (1982-2004)
Program Files (1986-1988)
61
1982-2004
Loc: D4485Box 10
of
13
27182
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.12
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Subject Files (1988-2002)
1988-2002
Loc: D4486Box 13
of
13
27185
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.05-R189.07
Occupational Info Coordinating Committee
Memoranda (1989-2002)
Office Files (1981-1999)
OIS Development Files (1980-2002)
1980-2002
Loc: D4484Box
7
of
13
27179
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.03
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Correspondence Files (1996-2002)
62
1982-2003
Loc: D4482Box
2
of
13
27174
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.03-R189.04
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Correspondence Files (1996-2002)
Meeting Files (1979-2002)
1979-2002
Loc: D4483Box
4
of
13
27176
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.05
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Memoranda (1981-1999)
1981-1999
Loc: D4484Box
6
of
13
27178
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.07
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
OIS Development Files (1980-2002)
63
1980-2002
Loc: D4485Box
9
of
13
27181
California State Archives
AN:
ID# - Agency/Source - Record Title - Dates
R189.11-R189.12
Occupational Information Coordinating Committee
Report Files (1984-2002)
Subject Files (1988-2002)
1984-2002
Loc:
D4486 Box
12
of
13
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