Transferring Your Archival Electronic Records to the Digital Archives

The Washington State Archives, Digital Archives' primary mission is to provide for the preservation of valuable legal and historical electronic records of the State so that they may be centralized and made more widely available (Chapter 434-662 WAC). Government agencies' electronic archival records are transferred to the Digital Archives at the end of their retention period, just as their archival paper records are transferred to the State Archives and the regional branches. Please consult the local government and state government Records Retention Schedules to identify which of your records are archival. If you need further assistance please contact the State Records Management office, or your Regional Archivist. Email and website preservation guidelines have been developed to further assist you. They can be found under the Services tab on our home page.

To begin the transfer process, consult with our archivist who will coordinate the transfer of your records. A few of the items we will discuss are:

• A sample of the electronic records for file format evaluation and testing may be requested by the Digital Archives.
• A Transmittal Agreement (TA) and a Transfer Information Plan (TIP) must be returned to the Digital Archives prior to transferring the records.
• The initial transfer of records will be made using a hard drive provided by the Digital Archives. This ensures that the drive has been virus scanned and is compatible with our hardware.
• Subsequent transfers of additional records for each record series may be submitted using SFTP.

Related resources:
Transmittal Agreement (TA)
Transfer Information Plan (TIP)

If you have archival electronic records to transfer to the Digital Archives please contact us at (509) 235-7509.