As the final post of 2008, and a fitting lead in to 2009 - given that Information Overload (IO) played a prominent roll this year and will continue to plague knowledge workers - comes from the Basex TechWatch Newsletter that I received today, reporting that the National Archives is about to be swamped by data from the Bush Administration. Overloaded to the tune of 100 Terabytes of data. Yeow!
The National Archives is an organization assigned the task of preserving and indexing Presidential records. According to the newsletter, the 100 TBs is 50 times that of the Clinton Administration. Email, which over the last 8 years has become the de facto standard for communication, is estimated to be 20 - 40 TBs of the data.
Apparently another issue is the format of some of the information - some is in a proprietary format. Basex cites a similar instance with NASA, which has millions of files still on 5.25" and 8" floppy disks and tape cartridges.
Of course, this begs the question...do we really need to have this much information from our administrations archived? Of course not, but by law it must be done and made available to the public. So with the anticipation that government will be increasing it's participation (or at least oversight) in the business world...expect more mandated information overload in 2009. As I previously blogged, CMS Watch has also predicted more regulation in the Content Management arena for 2009.
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