Home » Posts tagged 'NARA' (Page 15)
Tag Archives: NARA
National Archives 2.0?
The National Security Archive at George Washington University has an overview article with good links on recent hearings focusing on the National Archives.
- Archive Testifies to House Oversight Committee About Challenges Facing National Archives, "Recommends New Archivist Have a Vision for Archives 2.0" (May 21, 2009)
Powerpoint to the people
Thanks to Carl Malamud for the heads-up about this new article by Fred Kaplan at Slate entitled "PowerPoint to the People: The urgent need to fix federal archiving policies." Basically, according to Kaplan, the National Archives (NARA) are a mess. "Electronic records ... are generally not disposed of in accordance with federal regulations," and NARA is "still unable to accept M$ Word docs and PowerPoint slides." This endemic problem has been known for a long time. Kaplan links to a 2003 NARA study titled "Records Maintenance and Disposition in Headquarters Air Force Offices," (report written in January 2005) that had been FOIA'd -- oddly all of the recommendations were blacked out?! This shows that government agencies are not following protocols for digital records management and the agencies charged with preservation are not doing enough to either build solid preservation systems or work with agencies to help them get into the 21st century. Is this really the "end of history?" ["retweeted" from Carl malamud!] Continue reading
Are Federal Record-keeping Laws Out of Step With Modern Communications?
All the President's IMs: Are Federal Record-keeping Laws Out of Step With Modern Communications?, by MICHAEL C. DORF, FindLaw, Jan. 12, 2009. Dorf argues that our federal record-keeping laws are out of step with the ways in which people now communicate. Continue reading
NARA Cannot Assure Complete Transfer of Bush Records
NARA Cannot Assure Complete Transfer of Bush Records, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, January 5, 2009. Steven has a link to “National Archives Oversight: Protecting Our Nation’s History for Future Generations,” hearing before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, May 14, 2008 and comments on the the integrity of the process of transferring the records to the National Archives.
Although the President is supposed to obtain the written views of the Archivist prior to any proposed destruction of non-permanent records, "the final disposal authority rests with the incumbent president… regardless of the Archivist’s views."Continue reading
NARA invokes emergency plan to deal with deluge of White House data
The New York Times reports today on the problems the National Archives faces in acquiring, organizing, managing, preserving and making available the records of the Bush White House.
- Bush Data Threatens to Overload Archives, By Robert Pear And Scott Shane, New York Times, December 27, 2008.
The National Archives has put into effect an emergency plan to handle electronic records from the Bush White House amid growing doubts about whether its new $144 million computer system can cope with the vast quantities of digital data it will receive when President Bush leaves office on Jan. 20.Among the problems NARA faces? Volume: NARA anticipates getting 100 terabytes of data 50 times the what they got from the Clinton White House. This is the equivalent of five times the contents of all 20 million catalogued books in the Library of Congress. Cooperation: "Millions of White House e-mail messages created from 2003 to 2005 appear to be missing and may not be recoverable. And in September 2007, the top lawyer at the National Archives wrote in a memorandum that he had 'made almost zero progress' planning the transition because the White House had ignored repeated requests for information about the volume and formats of electronic records." In addition, Vice-President Cheney's lawyers claimed in a court filing that neither NARA nor the court "may supervise the vice president or his office" for compliance with the Presidential Records Act. Formats: NARA says that there are a large numbers of White House records created with proprietary commercial software. Access: Paul Brachfeld, the archives' inspector general, said "The electronic records archives system may be able to take in a tremendous amount of e-mail and other records.... But just because you ingest the data does not mean that people can locate, identify, recover and use the records they need." Continue reading
Latest Comments