One Archivist's Week: Nord Europa Moves Its Memory to the Cloud

Petra Šimková arrived at the Assembly building on Monday morning carrying a leather folder containing a handwritten list of 247 archive boxes that needed physical inspection before the cloud migration could begin. She has held the title of Chief Archivist for twenty-two years, and the folder, worn at the corners, contains notes in her own hand dating back to 2004. "This is what I do," she said, standing in the basement temperature-controlled vault where the Assembly's records have lived since 1962. "I make sure that what we keep is actually what we need."

The Nord Europa Assembly voted on Wednesday to approve the final phase of a three-year project to digitise and migrate its civic records to a federated cloud infrastructure operated jointly by the four regions and hosted on servers in Meridian. The vote was 34 to 8, with the Nord-Slovaka Bloc abstaining on procedural grounds—their objection being that such a move should require a referendum, not an assembly vote. The project will cost 1.8 million florins and will take eighteen months to complete.

For Šimková, the vote was the culmination of work that had consumed her week, and much of the past three years. She had to certify which records were legally mandated to be preserved, which were duplicates, and which could be discarded. She had to oversee the physical handling of documents dating to 1723. And she had to make peace with the fact that once the records moved to the cloud, her role would change fundamentally—from keeper of a physical archive to auditor of a digital one.