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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Summary and Recommendations
Summary and Recommendations
Pages 1-17
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The first report1 of the National Research Council's Committee on Digital Archiving and the National Archives and Records Administration and its subsequent letter report2 provided recommendations on design, engineering, and related issues facing the ERA program, which was being conceived at the time of their writing. Although some of the reports' conclusions relate to specific development initiatives and early design ideas, most of the observations about archive system design are not tied to these specifics and should remain useful to NARA as it develops, refines, and iterates the ERA program.
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The ERA program, the Records Management Redesign initiative, and NARA's work on records management under the egovernment initiative led by the Office of Management and Budget all reflect NARA's awareness of these problems and represent positive steps in starting to address them. As the findings and recommendations below indicate, electronic records represent both a substantial challenge and a significant opportunity for NARA.
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Saving the potentially huge amounts of data associated with these new types of information, re-creating the behavior of old IT systems decades later, and establishing what should be retained as a permanent record are all extremely difficult challenges. Recommendation 1.2 NARA should develop the capacity to predict and anticipate significant changes in record types and volume, styles of record keeping, and concepts of what should be preserved as a permanent record as well as the implications of such changes for future versions of the Electronic Records Archives (ERA)
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Recommendation 2.1 Because radical changes in information technology cannot be specifically anticipated, the ERA should be designed for change. The continuous and significant change in technology capabilities into the indefinite future means that flexibility in the design of the Electronic Records Archives will be essential.
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The ERA will benefit from continuing technology evolution only if the ERA implementation stays roughly in step with mainstream commercial trends. NARA should therefore use high-volume products wherever possible.
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In spite of this growth in understanding, new problems will arise as novel record data types emerge. There is, however, a significant opportunity for NARA to ease some preservation problems by helping promote the development and adoption of formats that have desired attributes for preservation.
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As the subrecommendations below detail, NARA should therefore establish procedures and systems to ingest new records automatically on a routine basis, capture metadata at or close to record creation, take steps to increase the likelihood that records are provided archive-ready, and use automatic techniques to supply missing metadata. In implementing the recommendations below, NARA should determine the areas in which existing law and regulations provide sufficient flexibility and those in which changes to the policies governing records management may be required.
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In particular, NARA should consider requiring all newly acquired agency systems that produce permanent records to do the following: create those records in formats acceptable to NARA, include explicit metadata in their output, and use standardized mechanisms for transferring records to NARA, such as using secure network communications. In the long run, archiving considerations will have to become part of the government process of software procurement and development for systems that produce or are deemed likely to produce permanent records.
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. Recommendation 3.2 The ERA system should include fallback capabilities that do not require intensive manual processing for instances in which agencies do not provide records archive-ready.
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For such partnerships to work, NARA will have to offer some form of incentive. For example, as NARA develops its electronic capabilities, it has the opportunity to provide generic expertise in electronic records management and preservation that complements the subject-matter expertise of the partner agencies.
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In the early stages of the ERA program, NARA sponsored several research and development projects in which it worked with limited segments of the relevant research community consisting of a small number of specific organizations. It has not, however, fully exploited opportunities to engage the broader research communities working in areas related to NARA's interests.
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Examples of research problems of particular importance to NARA and similar institutions include the following: how government transactions systems should be preserved, how to provide digital assurances over a very long period of time, and how to provide semiautomated redaction and declassification of materials. Working on these more specialized problems may require engagement with specific existing research communities.
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NARA's fundamental requirements for digital preservation and access are shared to varying degrees with a number of government organizations that also must maintain access to digital records into the indefinite future. Problems such as semiautomatic redaction or declassification can be investigated with partners such as DARPA or the intelligence community's Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA)
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In order to ensure trust in the digital records held by the ERA, stringent measures -- including the use of cryptographic techniques -- should be taken to protect records against deliberate or accidental compromise. These methods should be built into the ERA system design and its operational procedures.
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from then on, by maintaining the integrity of the stored data and associated metadata. Designing digital assurances into an electronic records archive is similar to designing security measures: that is, the cryptographic techniques must be chosen carefully, but more importantly, the overall system design, not just the cryptographic mechanisms, must not allow openings for attackers.
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NARA should help spread the use of digital assurance techniques, as well as monitor their use in records management, throughout the government. CONCLUDING REMARKS As the National Archives and Records Administration recognizes, its initiatives for electronic records are critical to fulfilling its mission to preserve essential evidence as society and
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Formal government communications continue to be conventional records: forms, letters, pictures, and so on. But citizens and government officials increasingly interact via email and text and voice messages, not memoranda and forms.
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