NARA enters new "ERA" of electronic records management: National Archives' initiatives focus on preserving and providing access to electronic records.

• Author: Weinstein, Allen
• Position: ARCHIVIST VIEW - National Archives and Records Administration

For many years the primary focus of the National Archives was preserving pieces of parchment and paper that had been created during more than two centuries of America's government. In that environment, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) could be content to watch change from the outside, analyze it over time, and respond to it after analysis proved the right course of action.

Today, the majority of government records are electronic, and the challenges of preserving and accessing these records do not allow NARA to easily see the paths to take to meet these challenges. Over the past 10 years, NARA has recognized that to fulfill its mission in an e government world, it must take a lead in accepting, understanding, and working to preserve and provide access to electronic records.

NARA does this to avoid nightmare scenarios such as retirees having trouble getting Social Security and other benefits because it is hard to retrieve their work records, which are in thousands of different electronic formats; veterans unable to receive proper medical treatment because their health and personnel files were "lost in the computers"; the records of scores of federal agencies--including those of the White House--sitting unprocessed in software that grows more obsolete by the hour; and having difficulty accessing sensitive national security documents classified battle plans, weapon designs, and intelligence data--because they are in outdated formats that future computers will not be able to read.

NARA's mission is to ensure continuing access to the essential documentation of the rights of American citizens and the actions of their government. It also promotes democracy, civic education, and historical understanding of the national experience. To fulfill this role as the recordkeeper of the federal government and educator of the nation's history, NARA must be imaginative, enterprising, and self-aware. These are lofty aspirations for a federal agency but qualities worth working to attain. Some ways in which NARA is pursuing these attributes are the development and deployment of the Electronic Records Archives (ERA), involvement in funding the "Persistent Archive Testbed" and the International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems (InterPARES) projects that further our knowledge of electronic records, and reengineering and transforming the way records are managed.

The Electronic Records Archives

The role of the ERA is simple and clear. It will accept and preserve the electronic records of government and ensure that they are available far into the future--to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Not only will ERA reach across time, but it will also reach across technology, converting information created today by literally thousands of software applications into computer language that can be mad years, decades, even centuries from now.

America's national...