APPENDIX E: JACKSONVILLE DISTRICT: DATA ARCHIVING, DATA
MANAGEMENT, AND CONTINUITY OF OPERATIONS IN THE
GEOSPATIAL DATA ARENA
RORY SUTTON, CESAJ
Several issues have recently emerged with regard to various collections of digital data.
One, which is currently being referred to as "data management," is being raised in the
context of federally funded environmental data. The broad idea is that federal funds are
scarce and subject to accountability in a political, as well as a financial, sense. Scientific
and other data financed this way must be safeguarded from loss and should be readily
available to the research community in general. This maximizes return on investment,
minimizes redundancy, and facilitates accountability. The Jacksonville District's partici-
pation in Everglades restoration and Florida Bay has brought us into contact with the
problems associated with finding, obtaining, and maintaining environmental data in an
interagency context. Preliminary discussion of data management has occurred in the Flor-
ida Bay PMC, the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force (SFERTF) Informa-
tion Management Council, and SERA. There are federal initiatives. The NRC has pub-
lished a book on environmental data management, Finding the Forest in the Trees (Holh
1998). Federal funding guidelines requiring return-on-investment (ROI) calculations and
data management plans for recipient grantees appear to be coming soon.
Another issue that is asserting itself is the archiving of digital data that the District
is required to maintain as permanent records. Examples of this are permitting actions
under Rivers and Harbors legislation and the Section 404 program, hydrographic and
topographic surveys, real estate determinations, and plans and specifications for projects.
As one would expect, we have established procedures for complying with these rules.
These procedures work well for physical documents, but they are starting to break down
under the increasing digitalization of all aspects of our business process. Within the year,
we will be capable of design, bid award, construction, payment, and transfer of a project
without resort to hard copy.
Achieving this state of automation is an explicit goal of the Corps of Engineers and the
District. At that point, the only reason to go to paper or mylar would be to comply with the
old hard-copy records management rules. Another pressure on existing archival methods
is decreasing space and budgets. The map file room, where hard-copy surveys are stored,
is under constant pressure to become smaller or nonexistent. The warehouse, which stores
real estate map files, is under consideration for elimination. These cost-cutting moves are
sometimes made without provision for replacing the mandated archiving functions that
were part of their reason for being.
Occasionally, the fact that a particular business process has been automated, and that
records are now digital, is advanced as a reason for eliminating physical storage, without
making provision for archiving the digital records. The assumption, it seems, is that if data
is on a computer, then it is "archived." This assumption is baseless. Backup of District
servers is designed only to provide reasonable assurance of overall continuity of opera-
tions under relatively minor hardware, software, and human failures. It is not designed for,
and doesn't work well for, permanent storage and retrieval of essential records. The physi-
cal media used for backups is extremely volatile compared with paper. Even so, the useful
life of a magnetic tape far exceeds the lifetime of the hardware and software required to
read it. The Harris minicomputers were retired in 1991. A contract with Harris Corp. in
1995 was required to retrieve data still faithfully recorded on their 9-track tapes. Within
a year, not even that will be an option. In this case, the problem is an unusual (these days)
word size and compression scheme. Intergraph supplies software with their modern sys-
tems to read tapes made on the old DEC VAX systems. The difficulty now is the lack of a
9-track tape drive and an old Intergraph workstation to connect it to. The VAX was retired
in 1993. Five years is a full generation in automation today, but a mere blink of the eye in
34
34
Previous Page
