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Records Management: NARA struggling with Data Volumes, Social Media and the Cloud
NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration, against a backdrop of rapidly chaning technologies, is under pressure to modernize their approach to managing records. Historically NARA has been a trendsetter and a model for US businesses, showcasing best practices for how to manage records. Over the last decade, NARA has struggled with how to effectively manage email and electronic documents as records, and now it is being faced with even more difficult problems with Social Media and Cloud technologies.
In an interview with Federal News Radio, Mike Wash, CIO at NARA, lamented over some of the many problems the agency is facing. “One of biggest problems that is lurking out there that we have already experienced at the archives, but is lurking across the federal government and probably the world is: How do you transport data effectively when you have to do something like long term preservation and permanent public access to records? The amount of data that has to be moved to the archives is overwhelming… That problem is looming. As more and more federal agencies are creating data, which are records, how do we effectively move that data into the records management process and into a permanent preservation process? That is cloud challenging sitting right in front of us. Instead of actually moving data physically, looking at how do you architect a storage infrastructure in the cloud so the movement of data is actually changing attributes associated with the data, the meta data associated with the records to identify this record in the federal cloud or one of the federated cloud is being moved into the custody of the National Archives.”
Paul Webster, chief records officer for the National Archive and Records Administration, said that “we need to figure out how to manage electronic records in ways that don’t require us to move them around physically, because we’re still in the physical moving business. We need to figure out how to use different technologies, different policies, the cloud.”
