Officials at the National Archives and Records Administration say the agency’s Electronic Records Archives will be the archives of the future.
After the agency completes the system in 2011, officials say it will be able to preserve, manage and provide sustained access to all types of electronic records and will function with any type of software or hardware.
The project reached an initial operating capability in June, a year later than the agency had projected. However, NARA and Lockheed Martin, the project’s prime contractor, say they have corrected problems and the system will be completed on schedule in 2011.
— Ben Bain
How does the government manage data that was born digital, meaning it was created in electronic form? Organizations as varied as the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the White House, open-government groups, and House members have recently offered recommendations for managing the growing volume of such information. Their approaches underscore the differences of opinion about how much responsibility and power various entities should have over future federal recordkeeping.
Electronic records management has been the topic of proposed legislation and rules, court cases, congressional investigations, hearings, and government audits as agencies weigh options for maintaining the vast amount of official communication that is conducted electronically. Because federal employees use e-mail and other technologies daily for routine notes and important information, it’s not always easy to decide which messages qualify as records that must be preserved. And once a decision is made, the next question is how best to store the messages.
Under the Federal Records Act, NARA approves agencies’ recordkeeping schedules and maintains data once it is submitted for archiving, but each agency decides whether to keep a document. In the case of e-mail messages, individual users typically make the decision.
“I think there is a growing consensus that electronic mail and other forms of electronic records that are born digital need to be managed and preserved in electronic form,” said Jason Baron, NARA’s director of litigation.
But lacking a statutory prescription for maintaining electronic records, most agencies print and file them as they would paper documents, according to a recent investigation by the Government Accountability Office. GAO’s report states that top agency officials are not properly maintaining their electronic communications, and NARA has not been inspecting agencies’ recordkeeping practices.
Those revelations provided fuel for House Democrats who were already angered by allegations that White House officials lost millions of e-mail messages generated during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq.
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