A county clerk and recorder holds deeds, mortgages, plats, and liens going back more than a century. The planning department keeps permits, inspections, and GIS layers. The council keeps minutes, ordinances, and resolutions. Much of it has been scanned from paper books; much more was born digital in systems that have since been replaced.
Some of these series are permanent. Others are kept for years under the state's approved retention schedule. Either way, the public can request them, and the agency must find, review, and produce the right record within the period set by law.
The challenge is not storing today's records. It is keeping records findable, readable, and trustworthy across decades of system replacements, without paying to keep every permanent record on primary disk forever.
Public records carry two obligations at once
The first is retention. Approved schedules decide whether a record series is temporary or permanent, how long temporary records are kept, and when they may be destroyed or transferred. For state and local governments, schedules are typically issued or approved by the state archives or a state records commission. For federal agencies, they are approved by NARA.
The second is access. State public-records acts, and FOIA for federal executive-branch agencies, give the public a right to request records and set deadlines and exemptions for responding. A record that is retained but cannot be located, retrieved, and reviewed in time does not meet the access obligation.
A preservation architecture has to serve both: keep the record intact for as long as the schedule requires, and keep it discoverable for as long as it can be requested.
Separate access from preservation
Most requests and daily work touch recent records. Older and permanent series are opened less often but cannot be lost. Keeping all of it on high-performance disk ties the cost of permanence to infrastructure designed for active workloads and forces a migration every time that infrastructure is refreshed.
The agency's records-management or document-management system remains authoritative for record series, schedules, legal holds, redaction, and disclosure decisions. ELS provides the preservation layer underneath. Active files stay on performance storage. Retained and permanent records are written to write-once optical media that remain indexed and retrievable through oRain.
A smaller agency or a single department might use an integrated Active Archive system such as ELS150 or ELS300, which combines cache and an automatic optical copy in one appliance. A state agency or large county can scale across networked ELS libraries in one namespace. Where physical isolation is warranted, verified media can move to an offline library while its location remains tracked.
Answering the request on deadline
A preservation tier helps with public-records requests only if the request can actually reach it. That depends on what is preserved alongside the content: record series, identifiers, dates, parties, parcel or case numbers, and other descriptive metadata the records system uses to search.
Test this before it matters. Run a mock request against a series that has been moved to preservation, time how long it takes to locate, retrieve, and stage the records for exemption review, and compare that with the statutory response period. If retrieval from optical media is slower than from disk, plan for it in the request workflow rather than discovering it on deadline.
Redaction, exemption decisions, and release remain functions of the records system and the agency's staff. The preservation copy should stay unaltered; redacted release copies are separate derivatives.
Permanent means planning for change
Write-once optical media protects a preserved copy against alteration and removes the need to rewrite permanent records on every disk refresh. It does not remove the need to plan for change over decades.
Permanent electronic records should be kept in open or well-documented formats, with the metadata needed to interpret them, periodic fixity checks to confirm they remain intact, and a documented path for migrating to new media and readers when the time comes. Federal rules at 36 CFR 1236.28 add storage-environment and media-maintenance requirements for media holding permanent or unscheduled federal records; state archives may set comparable expectations.
The question to ask of any preservation tier is not only how long the media lasts, but how the agency will know the records are still intact, and how it will move them when the technology around them changes.
Transfer to the archives
Many permanent records eventually leave the creating agency. State archives accept permanent state and local records under their own transfer rules. Federal agencies transfer permanent records to NARA under 36 CFR Part 1235 when they become eligible under the approved schedule, or after 30 years.
Federal agencies must retain a copy of transferred permanent electronic records until NARA confirms it has assumed responsibility for their preservation. Transfer media, formats, and required documentation are specified or agreed with the receiving archive. A well-preserved copy with intact metadata makes transfer easier, but it is not a substitute for the transfer itself.
Requirements to assess
State public-records and retention laws: the state's public-records act sets disclosure duties, exemptions, and response periods; the state archives or records commission typically issues the approved retention schedules for local government. These vary by state and record series.
FOIA (5 U.S.C. 552): applies to federal executive-branch agencies, not to state or local governments. Agencies generally have 20 working days to determine whether to comply with a request, subject to extensions, and must search for responsive records wherever they are stored.
NARA records schedules and 36 CFR Parts 1235 and 1236: for federal agencies, approved schedules govern retention and disposition, Part 1235 governs transfer of permanent records to NARA, and Part 1236 sets electronic recordkeeping controls including media maintenance for permanent records.
Records that include criminal-justice, health, tax, or other protected information may carry additional requirements, such as the CJIS Security Policy, HIPAA, or IRS Publication 1075. Confirm applicability with the agency's records officer and counsel. No storage product by itself makes an agency compliant.
Keep the record, and the way back to it
Public records are kept so that people can rely on them: to prove ownership, to understand a decision, to hold government accountable. That only works if the record can be found and trusted when someone asks for it.
Retention keeps the record. Access keeps it useful. A preservation architecture should do both, for as long as the record matters.