The official repository of retired U.S. government records is a boxy white building tucked into the woods of suburban College Park, MD. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is a subdued place, with researchers quietly thumbing through boxes of old census, diplomatic, or military records, and occasionally requesting a copy of one of the computer tapes that fill racks on the climate-controlled upper floors. Researchers generally don't come here to look for contemporary records, though. Those are increasingly digital, and still repose largely at the agencies that created them, or in temporary holding centers. It will take years, or decades, for them to reach NARA, which is charged with saving the retired records of the federal government (NARA preserves all White House records and around 2 percent of all other federal records; it also manages the libraries of 12 recent presidents). Unfortunately, NARA doesn't have decades to come up with ways to preserve this data. Electronic records rot much faster than paper ones, and NARA must either figure out how to save them permanently, or allow the nation to lose its grip on history.

One clear morning earlier this year, I walked into a fourth-floor office overlooking the woods. I was there to ask Allen Weinstein -- sworn in as the new Archivist of the United States in February -- how NARA will deal with what some have called the pending "tsunami" of digital records. Weinstein is a former professor of history at Smith College and Georgetown University and the author of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (1978) and coauthor of The Story of America (2002). He is 67, and freely admits to limited technical knowledge. But a personal experience he related illustrates quite well the challenges he faces. In 1972, Weinstein was a young historian suing for the release of old FBI files. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover -- who oversaw a vast machine of domestic espionage -- saw a Washington Post story about his efforts, wrote a memo to an aide, attached the Post article and penned into the newspaper's margin: "What do we know about Weinstein?" It was a telling note about the mind-set of the FBI director and of the federal bureaucracy of that era. And it was saved -- Weinstein later found the clipping in his own FBI file.