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Records Management: $ Millions More for NARA's Billions of Docs
Change is happening at NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration. Finally — after struggling for nearly a year with no leader.
In late December, David Ferriero became the 10th US archivist at NARA, after appointment by Obama and approval of the Senate. His background ranges from heading records management teams at the New York Public Library, Duke University, and MIT. Ferriero will lead NARA on its mission to archive and preserve records from presidential administrations, help federal agencies in their management of electronic data, and manage a on-going $550 million electronic record keeping project (ERA). ERA will be partly funded from their $470 million annual budget that was recently approved by Obama.
Much of the work of the ERA project has been contracted out to Lockheed Martin, and the project is expected to complete in March 2012. By late 2009, NARA had completed capturing 77 terabyes of information from the Bush administration — more than 35 times the data received from the Clinton administration.
As of December, NARA is now also tasked with streamlining the process by which data is declassified. Part of that effort is to create a quality process and to develop a method for training reviewers in how to identify material that can be declassified.
Ferriero also will need to grapple with data security issues too. There have been a number of incidents where data has been lost or misplaced at NARA. In May 2009, a 2 terabyte hard drive from the Clinton administration went missing.
Ferriero responded to a question about what makes record management hard for NARA by saying “I think it’s not specific to electronic records; it’s technology in general. It feels very much like my experience in the university setting, where schools and faculties are allowed to do their own thing. [They’re] very entrepreneurial, so the variety of platforms, software packages, the homegrown approaches to doing their work is very much what I see here with records in the agencies. There are no standards, which makes it difficult for the archives then to ingest the content.”
But there are certainly standards. The DoD 5015.2 immediately comes to mind. Perhaps what Ferriero is hinting at is that agencies aren’t following the standards well that already exist. While the scope of documents which NARA deals with is clearly huge, their issues and problems of enforcement and dealing with compliance to process may not be that much different than other organizations.
