FBI works to better manage its records.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: Up front: news, trends & analysis

After recent criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) records management skills, the bureau has begun working to clean up its act by creating a records management division.

"We need to figure out how to manage our case files effectively," William L. Hooton, assistant director of the FBI's new records management division, recently told Government Computer News (GCN) (www.gcn.com). "We have no real, in my opinion, records management system at the bureau."

According to GCN, the FBI currently is converting 750,000 documents a day to electronic format in an effort to build an inventory of its records. The bureau is scanning its records at a facility dubbed the DocLab and is employing a "dirty" optical character reader (OCR) process instead of a corrected OCR process to speed up operations.

"We just don't have the time right now to do very high-quality OCR," Hooton said. The purpose of scanning the records is to create databases to which the bureau can apply data-mining techniques.

GCN reported that the FBI consolidated almost 1,000 employees into the records management division, bringing together staff from 22 organizations to form the largest division at bureau headquarters. At a recent...