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Building an Electronic Records Archive Letter Report (2003) / Chapter Skim
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Contents of Letter Report
Pages 1-7

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From page 1...
... The comments below elaborate on issues discussed in the committee's first report, Building an Electronic Records Archive at the National Archives and Records Administration. Recommendations for Initial Development (hereafter referred to as the committee's first report)
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From page 2...
... The DRFP makes occasional mention of measures that might help in averting threats (physical distribution of storage sites, user authentication, audit logs, etc.) , but it includes no overall requirement that the system be capable of surviving an attack or accident.7 Records stored in the ERA will be kept for hundreds of years and must be protected against loss due to natural disasters, hardware and software failures, operator errors, and potential attacks from both inside and outside NARA (committee' s first report, Recommendation 4, p.
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From page 3...
... ,,11 It would be best to omit these references, because whether and how to employ persistent data formats is an internal implementation decision. Instead, NARA can evaluate proposed designs on the basis of how they handle the obsolescence of data types, the degree to which they introduce errors, and so on.
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From page 4...
... If the latter, this requirement would intrude on a contractor's ability to provide the best technologies for storing data for Tong periods—chiefly, using redundancy techniques in such a way that recovering data from failed media is unnecessary. If the phrase "automated media maintenance" refers to robotic tape libraries, it, too, overconstrains the solution.
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From page 5...
... Over time, agencies may come to play a greater role in record ingest, and NARA's role will be to provide the ingest software or specifications, and to provide careful automatic checking of the records that have been ingested, together with associated data (data currently entered in Standard Form 25S, metadata tags, file format integrity, authenticity checks, etc.~. Another good example of the value of distributed operations is the opportunity to leverage externally supplied preservation tools, either for file migration or for on-the-fly presentation of an obsolete format.
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From page 6...
... Sincerely, Robert F Sproull, Chair Committee on Digital Archiving and the National Archives and Records Administration
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From page 7...
... Available online at . Electronic Records Archives Program Management Office, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
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Key Terms

  • national archives
  • record types
  • records administration
  • records archives
  • distributed operations

  • data types
  • bit stream
  • original bit
  • iterative design
  • persistent formats

  • safe stores
  • challenge industry
  • metadata tags
  • records archive
  • management office

  • explicit threat
  • failed media
  • deployment concept
  • threat analysis
  • electronic record

  • initial development
  • federation interface
  • draft request
  • particular record
  • digital archiving

  • nara employees
  • threat model
  • record ingest
  • service levels
  • data formats


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