Can NARA handle onslaught of Bush e-records?

• Position: ARCHIVES - National Archives and Records Administration - Electronic records - Report

National Archives officials estimate that the electronic records of the George W. Bush years are about 50 times as large as those left by the Clinton White House in 2001, and they include everything from top-secret e-mail plans for the Iraq war to scenes from the "Barney Cam 2008," a White House video featuring the first pet.

The Bush administration said it had transferred more than 300 million e-mail messages to the National Archives, as well as more than 25,000 boxes of paper records, before leaving office January 20.

Archives officials estimate that the e-records of the Bush White House total 100 terabytes (TB) of information - about five times the contents of all 20 million catalogued books in the Library of Congress, according to The New York Times.

Sam Watkins, a transition liaison officer at the archives, told The Times that his agency was expecting to receive 20 to 24 TB of e-mail from the Bush White House. The Clinton White House turned over less than 1 TB of e-mail, he said.

Under federal law, the government has "complete ownership, possession, and control" of presidential and vice presidential records. The moment an administration leaves office, the U.S. archivist becomes legally responsible for "the custody, control, and preservation" of the records.

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According to media sources, NARA enacted a contingency plan in November to handle e-records from the Bush White House, amid growing doubts about whether its new archival system would be ready for the vast quantities of digital data from Bush's eight-year tenure. Archives officials who disclosed the emergency plan said the agency initially took over parts of the White House storage system, freezing the contents on January 20. Later, archivists will move the records into NARA's Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system.

Ken Thibodeau, director of the ERA program, told ComputerWorld that the second phase of ERA, designed for presidential records, was ready for the crush of records--or as ready as it can be "when you're staring at 100 TB of...