MANILA, Philippines -- Digital archiving is going to be a necessity in the 21st century, a Washington-based digital archivist said during a briefing of Microsoft in Kirkland, Washington.

“We can’t simply print everything out,” said Adam Jansen, a digital archivist for the State of Washington who currently manages a new kind of digital archive for both state and local government.

Jansen said that very few governments around the world are now concerned with preserving historical and cultural records, documents and other data that could be accessed by people in the future.

This is despite the shifting form of media from analog to digital, the increasing public demand for access to information and the need to offer information 24 hours a day Jansen said.

Resistance to change and the inability to keep pace with fast-moving developments in technology have already stifled many governments from moving forward, he added.

Sharing his experience in Washington, Jansen said that about 50 percent of the cultural and historical information of the State has already been lost because of the lack of foresight to move quickly to digital archiving.

The Washington State has its own archives now available online, thanks to efforts of the likes of Jansen. The online service contains about 26.5 million records, including marriage, death and birth certificates, and other government records.

One of the key considerations in building a digital archive is format, Jansen stressed.

“Format matters. Records must become available to future generations,” he said.

He also pointed out that it is the “content that drives retention and not the media.”

Washington’s digital archives contain voluminous documents still using the old binary document format of Microsoft. The project is now integrating the newer document format called open Extensible Markup Language.

“Electronic archiving is not cheap. But it has to be done because we’d be losing our cultural and historical heritage if we won't,” Jansen said.

The State of Washington initially spent $2 million to build the online digital archive. Currently, the project processes about 2 million records a day. These are mostly “public records,” Jansen stressed.

National libraries of Britain, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and New Zealand are also working on their respective digital archives, Jansen said.