Building an Electronic Records Archive at the National Archives and Records Administration Recommendations for a Long-Term Strategy (2005) / Chapter Skim
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2 Reengineering Processes to Meet the Electronic Records Challenge
2 Reengineering Processes to Meet the Electronic Records Challenge
Pages 35-45
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From page 35... ...
program, the Records Management Redesign initiative, and an initiative on records management under the administration's e-government initiative -- NARA has taken a number of steps toward building needed technical capabilities for the archiving and preserving of the federal government's electronic records and toward making associated changes in process. Electronic Records Archives NARA's Electronic Records Archives program was begun in 1998.
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From page 36... ...
for the ERA system, "seeking input from industry to ensure that the final RFP clearly communicates the purpose of the acquisition."3 Before preparing this report, the National Research Council's Committee on Digital Archiving and the National Archives and Records Administration prepared two reports providing advice related to the ERA acquisition: its first report recommended a strategy for engineering and acquiring the ERA using an iterative design approach, and a letter report provided specific comments to NARA regarding the draft RFP.4 Also in August 2003, the General Accounting Office released a report5 that "found several deficiencies in NARA's plan for the [system's] acquisition," including the lack of a "concept of operations for the system from the users' perspective" and an "incomplete schedule and process to track the costs of the program."6 In 2004, NARA released the final version of its RFP and subsequently selected two contractors to develop designs for the ERA.7 As NARA observes, much "remains to be done before the vision of ERA becomes a reality.
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Strategic Directions for Federal Records Management. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
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From page 38... ...
Those tactics include such things as promoting good communications between NARA and stakeholders, modifying guidance and training programs, providing assistance to agencies, providing agency oversight, supporting the development of records-management tools, and reengineering NARA's own business processes. Recently, NARA has also issued several white papers in support of the Strategic Directions report.
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From page 39... ...
For example, NARA has expanded the acceptable methods for transferring electronic records to NARA, and it has issued guidance for transferring permanent electronic records of the following types: e-mail records (including attachments) , Web content records, scanned images of textual records, digital photography records, digital geospatial data records, and records in portable document format.
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Paper records naturally require a good deal of manual processing to acquire and appraise. Current procedures for transferring electronic records also involve significant manual intervention, starting with the effort associated with creating and organizing metadata into finding aids and the transfer of physical media or the initiation of a network file transfer.
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However, several trends over the past three decades have made it more difficult to carry out traditional records scheduling and disposition activities: · New ways of working that supplant the traditional organizational hierarchy with greater use of teams, task forces, and so on that are project- or goal-oriented, rather than procedureoriented; · The reduction in administrative and clerical staff responsible for organizing, filing, and retrieving records and developing retention and disposition schedules, and the resulting transfer of responsibility for record management to end-user agency staff; · The preference for electronic communication and record keeping over paper-based systems; and · The dearth of useful tools that can integrate records management into end-user tasks and activities. At the same time, several technology trends compel a rethinking of selection, appraisal, and description in two major areas:
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that would not have been feasible for paper records, even though some records with little permanent value may be intermingled. NARA appears to be moving in this direction in the Records Management Redesign initiative, with its emphasis on functional appraisal, which implicitly is more broadly granular.
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From page 43... ...
Successful implementation of the ERA system may also require NARA to become more actively involved in the establishment of standards used in constructing federal systems, such as those governing the formats used to represent records and associated metadata, and for NARA -- or other bodies responsible for information policy, such as the Office of Management and Budget -- to establish guidance to agencies and auditing and enforcement measures as necessary. As a practical matter, these efforts should link archive-ready concerns with agency interests in supporting the agencies' own record-keeping operations.
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It would be impractical to expect NARA to develop domain expertise sufficient to operate online access to all forms of government data. 17National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
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· By banding together, NARA and other organizations stand a much better chance of spreading widely the standards and tools for preparing records that are archive-ready, of developing affordable software to meet the needs of researchers and other clients of these repositories, and of otherwise making electronic records archives practical in the long run. Despite these advantages to cooperative arrangements, there is a potential downside to a distributed set of archives.
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