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NARA seeking public comment on a proposed rule concerning the digitization of public records

The first 2 weeks of 2021 have been a whirlwind and have included a failed insurrection at the nation’s capitol and the SECOND(!) impeachment of President Trump for inciting that insurrection!

However crazy things may be at the moment, I wanted to call our readers’ attention to an extremely important announcement in the Federal Register regarding a proposed rule “Digitizing Permanent Records and Reviewing Records Schedules.”

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is proposing to “…amend our electronic records management regulations to add a subpart containing standards for digitizing permanent Federal records so that agencies may dispose of the original source records, where appropriate and in accordance with the Federal Records Act amendments of 2014. We are also making a minor revision to our records schedule review provisions to establish a requirement for agencies to review, every five years, all records schedules that are ten years old and older, based on the date the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) approved the schedule.”

The public commenting period is open UNTIL FEBRUARY 1, 2021. Please submit comments via the Federal eRulemaking Portal Regulations.Gov. Follow the site’s instructions for submitting comments and include the Regulatory Information number RIN 3095-AB99 on the submission. As the FR notes, due to COVID, paper mail submissions are not recommended.

If anyone submits a a public comment, I’d really appreciate if you could copy it to comments on this blog post. Share what interests or disturbs you about NARA’s proposed rule.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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