Preserving the Administrative Record

The administrative record consists of both analog and digital materials.

The digital materials include emails exchanged during the course of the project, internal project websites, and bug-tracking reports.

Why preserve the administrative record?

1. The administrative record will contain information about how the system was built: pipelining workflow and programs related to data transformation and access). It is important for us to have this context, to help us understand how the pieces fit together.
2. In future, historians of science might want to know how a project of this size and scope was conceived and managed. What was initially conceived as a project to archive unique and significant "big data" will inevitably become yet another cultural memory initiative. Both the scientific and the human sides of this project are of equal value for long-term preservation.