My wife recently receivedshipment of several boxes of her old vinyl albums courtesy of hermother's spring-cleaning efforts.

However, having gone digital many years ago, we had nothing wecould play these records on. So there they sat gathering dust inour home theater room.

After having the same, “Gee, it would be fun to listen to theseagain,” conversation, I finally relented and surprised her on herbirthday with a new audiophile turntable and old-school tubepre-amp.

To say it was challenging trying to figure out how to regressusing state-of-the-art equipment would be an understatement. I grewup with the combo turntable, eight-track player, and radio builtinto a single, dust-covered box. So no brains required.

However, the advancements in retro-tech required a fair bit ofeducation to integrate this old-school technology into my modernenvironment. The payoff, of course, was being able to listen torecordings made in an analog world long before digital signalprocessors and CDs found their way into our lives.

Believe it or not, the subtleties of the recordings and thenuances associated with vinyl actually have a much richer andfuller sound than most of today's digital recordings. Thetrade-offs obviously are the annoying little pops that come fromdust on the records, which are removed on today's CDs.

Having experienced this exercise, it also occurred to me thatonce again there are parallels in life both in what I enjoy doingas a hobby and what I do for a living in the technology world ofcomputers and software.

Shortly after I signed my wife off and let her fly solo on theturntable, I received an email from a local government agencyasking if our company could digitize some old records and make thembackwards compatible to an archaic image format currently in use intheir offices.

Of course the answer was yes. But, once again, I was backresearching how things were done in the good ol' days in the earlyimaging world.

Having the opportunity to see the copies of the documents wasagain quite fascinating as they were records that went back almosta century ago and gave a peek into our local history. Thesedocuments reminded me of the importance our historical records haveregardless of the formats, the types of records, or even whetherthey are of a personal, business or government nature.

This point leads me to the essence of this article: If you aregoing to archive records, both literally and figuratively, you needto plan ahead, realizing that technology and storage methodologiesare going to change over time.

Read more: 9 points to consider …

In my case, I should have kept my old record player since I knewwe had quite a library of records not only from our teenage yearsbut our parents as well. Ever play a clay or steel record?

In the case of our business or government records, it becomeseven more important to plan ahead and keep the ability to store,access, and back up these records over longer periods oftime–especially now since technology is changing so rapidly.

In the case of government records, they started off on paper,moved to microfilm and microfiche, and then later into digitalformats as did many businesses. The challenges now are keeping therecords in an easily accessible format, indexed, and backed upappropriately and still make them available to the end user whenneeded.

There is no magic formula for this process other than to puttogether a true records retention policy in your organization anddetermine some of the following:

1. What records need to be kept.
2. How long the retention period is on those records.
3. Are they permanent records such as mortgages, etc.?
4. What is the primary document format? Some states still requirepaper can you deal with a hybrid.
5. What data sets are used to index these documents
6. Are you prepared for the technology changes to ensurereadability and accessibility?
7. Do you have a tested back up and recovery system in place?
8. Do you constantly review and revise your plan to make sure youdon't lose anything along the way?
9. Finally, do you have a disaster recovery plan for yourdocuments, either paper andor digital? Most people fail to realizethat your documents comprise about 50% of your business continuity.That said, you may survive the initial disaster, but if you can'trecreate your processes and/or documentation, you may ultimatelyfail to continue on.

Whether we are talking about records like our music albums oryour business records, as in archive data and documents, it iscritical to ensure you maintain the capability of playing oraccessing your documents by constantly checking to providecompatibility as you migrate your technology forward.

Assuring this capability exists not only protects your future asa viable entity, you might also find a gem in looking back at thesehistorical items down the road, as well.

My teenage daughter has discovered the fun of inviting friendsover to listen to these ancient musical discoveries. And since manyof her friends' parents also have their old albums, the turntableis giving our kids a glimpse into a world that we grew up in longbefore CDs, much less iPods and MP3 players.

For once in our lives, we are the cool parents.

ScottCowan is vice president of sales and marketing at Millennial Vision Inc.in Salt Lake City.