President Obama and digital data
by Hu Yoshida on June 3, 2009
Last night I watched the NBC special ” Inside the Obama White House” . If you didn’t see it click on the link above and checkout some of the videos from that program. The first segment introduces you to the staff, with young twenty type staffers, and everyone on Blackberrys.
When I see that I think of the presidential archives that President Bush transferred to the National Archives on January 20th when he left office. There was reported to be about 100 TB which was 50 times more that the amount of digital data that was archived for the Clinton presidency. President Bush did not use email and did not have a laptop for security reasons.
With President Obama, they have not only solved the security problem with Black berrys, but his administration has embraced social networking, with accounts on Myspace, facebook, and twitter.
In President Obama’s first 100 days in office he has probably generated more digital data than President Bush did in 8 year of office! When President Obama leaves office after eight years, there will probably be tens of petabytes of digital data to be archived. President Bush’s archives are on a Hitachi Content Archive Platform, since it is the only content archive that can scale to petabytes.
If you watch the video of the NBC special, it is interesting to watch the segment on Anatomy of a Talking point, to see how quickly this administration responded to the criticism for President Obama’s nomination to the Supreme Court, Sonia Sot0mayor. I wonder how much of this will need to kept in the Presidential archives?
In another segment President Obama goes out to buy hamburgers for his staff. I know that menus for state dinners are part of the archives. Will he need to save his receipt for these hamburgers?
