Federal record standards run up flagpole

• By Joab Jackson
• Sep 01, 2004

A White House-led interagency group for developing information management standards has released two new draft documents for public review. They concern how agencies may be required to handle electronic information in the future.

The Federal Interagency Committee on Government Information, established by the Office of Management and Budget, prepared the documents.

The first draft outlines the requirements that a standard would need to meet for tagging documents with identifying government information.

The second draft recommends a set of standards agencies should use in implementing electronic search, standards that would allow users to do a single search across different systems.

The Interagency Committee on Government Information was created to implement to Section 207 of the E-Government Act of 2002, which calls for developing standards for archiving, categorizing and making available government-generated electronic information in a consistent fashion.

'At some level, every piece of government information has to be citable, in the same way there is a format for footnotes. That is what we're trying to do,' said according to Eliot Christian, chair of the working group, speaking at group meeting held Monday.

The working groups for each of drafts will be accepting comments until Sept. 27. Once the recommendations are completed, they will be submitted to the OMB in early December.