My wife recently received shipment of several boxes of her old vinyl albums courtesy of her mother's spring-cleaning efforts.

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

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

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

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

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

Having experienced this exercise, it also occurred to me that once again there are parallels in life both in what I enjoy doing as a hobby and what I do for a living in the technology world of computers and software.

Shortly after I signed my wife off and let her fly solo on the turntable, I received an email from a local government agency asking if our company could digitize some old records and make them backwards compatible to an archaic image format currently in use in their offices.

Of course the answer was yes. But, once again, I was back researching how things were done in the good ol' days in the early imaging world.

Having the opportunity to see the copies of the documents was again quite fascinating as they were records that went back almost a century ago and gave a peek into our local history. These documents reminded me of the importance our historical records have regardless of the formats, the types of records, or even whether they are of a personal, business or government nature.

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

Read more: 9 points to consider …

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

In the case of our business or government records, it becomes even more important to plan ahead and keep the ability to store, access, and back up these records over longer periods of time–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 digital formats as did many businesses. The challenges now are keeping the records in an easily accessible format, indexed, and backed up appropriately and still make them available to the end user when needed.

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

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

Whether we are talking about records like our music albums or your business records, as in archive data and documents, it is critical to ensure you maintain the capability of playing or accessing your documents by constantly checking to provide compatibility as you migrate your technology forward.

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

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

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

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

Instant Insights /

Record Retention Makes Beautiful Music

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