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NARA prepares for a new era in records management
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What makes a record
GCN: What is the basic definition of an e-record as opposed to something that is disposable? For example, an e-mail that says, “Jane, let’s meet for lunch today?” as compared with “Jane, let’s meet for lunch today to discuss the IT procurement?”
BELLARDO: Technically, for federal agencies, the definition of a record in 44 U.S.C. 3301 applies to government information, whether in paper, electronic, or other format or medium.
There are two basic questions to answer: Was it created (or received) in the course of doing agency business? Does it need to be kept to document agency business?
If the answer to both questions is “yes,” then it is a record.
The real question then is, How long do I need to keep it? Records schedules provide that answer. While e-mail can be used to conduct substantive business, a lot of e-mails, like the first example, are either personal messages or very transitory in nature.
The second example depends on the context. If the message were from a manager to a subordinate and the purpose of the discussion were just to give the manager a brief and informal status report, the agency probably would not need a record that such a discussion had occurred.
However, if the manager was an assistant secretary and Jane was an assistant secretary in another cabinet department, and the purpose of the discussion was to start negotiations for a major, interagency procurement aimed at an objective defined in statute or by the president, then both agencies would probably want to have a record of when the negotiations began.
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In addition, records management has not been the most popular subject among agency executives, leaving records managers paddling against the managerial current. The National Archives and Records Administration recognized the e-records glut early on and since 1997 has been working on a solution—the Electronic Records Archive system.
But the new application, for which NARA is competing a contract between Lockheed Martin Corp. and Harris Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., is at least three years away. In the meantime, NARA is working with agencies to lessen the impact of managing these records.
GCN writers Joab Jackson, Jason Miller and Richard W. Walker sat down with NARA’s deputy archivist Lewis Bellardo, CIO and assistant archivist Reynolds Cahoon and Electronic Records Management e-government project co-managers Nancy Allard and Mark Giguere to discuss how NARA is helping agencies cope with these challenges.
GCN: What are the biggest challenges for NARA when it comes to managing electronic records?
BELLARDO: The biggest challenges for us relate to the electronic records and the whole wave of technological change that has occurred in last several years. The challenges have dealt both in terms of how agencies and programs manage their records for business purposes, and how to share government information across agencies, across space and across time.
We have to really remake our entire program as it relates to the information lifecycle. The big enchilada for us, of course, in terms of development, is the Electronic Records Archive.
The other side of that is what is happening within the agencies and how they cope with the management of government information.
What we have found is there is an enormous explosion in electronic information within the government in the last several years, including the work with the Internet and the Web. In addition to the multiplicity of formats, the scariest part of it all is the obsolescence—the technological obsolescence of hardware and software formats and so forth.
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