(a) Findings and purpose. — The Legislature finds that continuous advances in technology have resulted and will continue to result in the development of alternate formats for the nonerasable storage of state records, and that the use of such alternative storage formats, where deemed advisable, promote the efficient and economical administration of government and provide a means for the preservation of valuable records that are subject to decay or destruction. It is the purpose of the Legislature to authorize the storage of state records in those alternate formats, as may be determined by the various branches of the government of this state, that will reasonably ensure that the originals of those records are copied into alternative formats in a manner in which the image of the original records is not erased or altered, and from which true and accurate reproductions of the original state records may be retrieved.
(b) Approved format. — (1) In addition to those formats, processes and systems described in section ten of this article, sections seven-a and seven-c, article one, chapter fifty-seven of this code, and section twelve, article five of that chapter which are otherwise authorized for the reproduction of state records, a preservation duplicate of a state record may be stored in any approved format where the image of the original state record is preserved in a form in which the image thereof is incapable of erasure or alteration, and from which a reproduction of the stored state record may be retrieved which truly and accurately depicts the image of the original state record.
(2) As a substitute for using medium that is incapable of erasure or alteration, a preservation duplicate of a state record may be stored on other electronic storage medium or other medium capable of storing digitized documents if: