The public value of record keeping is rooted in the institutional and legal core of Washington state government. The Washington Secretary of State is independently elected state-wide and second in line of succession to the Governor.⁶ He is the state's chief elections officer, chief corporations officer, and supervisor of the State Library and Archives. His constitutional and statutory duties make the Office of Secretary of State the most logical site for a digital archiving initiative. The key statutory duties with respect to digital archiving are:

• Collecting and preserving the historical records of the state, and making those records available for research;
• coordinating implementation of the state's records management laws.

Each of the records that result from the exercise of these responsibilities carries great social and economic consequences, for the parties directly connected to the records as well as for overall public trust in government and public order.

The relationship between state and county government in Washington is central to the public value proposition because both the content and development strategy of the WSDA are tied to the counties. County governments are creatures of the state. In legal and institutional terms, Washington’s 39 counties are subordinate to the state, and form the basic unit of local government.⁷ And the great majority of records to be archived originate at the county level. As the general government unit, the county is responsible for originating, recording, and preserving records of births, marriages, deaths, elections, land ownership, court actions, business licenses, and some of the other record keeping listed previously in the Secretary of State’s responsibilities. The county-level records are the official versions of these documents. But the responsibility for long-term preservation and access to these records is shared with the Secretary of State, in part through the Secretary’s records management function.⁸ A digital archiving capability thus supports the institutional roles of both state and county governments, which were the basis for the development strategy.