Building an Electronic Records Archive at the National Archives and Records Administration Recommendations for Initial Development (2003) / Chapter Skim
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Summary and Recommendations
Summary and Recommendations
Pages 1-12
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As NARA recognizes, it is critical to start developing new electronic records preservation capabilities quickly in order to continue to fulfill NARA's mandate to preserve federal records.
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The requirements of NARA's ERA program have much in common with those of other digital preservation systems. Although NARA's statutory mandate to preserve federal records is unique, many organizations need to preserve digital objects and are taking steps to design and implement systems that address this need.
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NARA must also be ready to preserve materials of very diverse types, even if they were created by obsolete systems or saved on obsolete storage media; by contrast, many digital libraries can simplify their challenge by accommodating only a limited set of contemporaneous or common data types. Indeed, the ERA will have to be capable of ingesting the full variety of data types used to create permanent records across the federal government, which will roughly correspond to the full variety of data types in use more broadly.
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From page 4... ...
Nor does this exploratory work substitute for having NARA staff work with a system in a production environment; users of SDSC's scientific data management systems, unlike the likely users of the ERA, are generally very technically savvy and can turn to a highly proficient support staff. Finally, the SDSC work emphasized a particular strategy for digital preservation: migrating records to XML-based formats.
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From page 5... ...
These estimates, which are needed to inform the technical structure of the system, may follow directly from estimates of the record population but may also be governed by the overall project plan, ingest rates, and other considerations · Mechanisms for delivering records to NARA. While today's and fixture records can be delivered to NARA using secure networking techniques, records generated over the past 30 years or less may reside outside of network-connected systems on media that are rapidly becoming obsolete.
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From page 6... ...
One way to gain experience is to build an effective bit storage capability that supports pilot programs to begin preserving records in the short term and that provides a critical foundation for future systems with broader capabilities. Some basic ingest (i.e., intake of records and associated metadata)
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These derived forms can readily be created for many common record types by making use of already-existing export functions or conversion software. Derived forms are, however, no substitute for preserving and providing access to the original bits.
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Insufficient technical expertise at NARA is a major obstacle to successful development and acquisition of the ERA. Based on briefings and other interactions with NARA staff, the committee concludes that while there is recognition of the importance of the ERA program, few NARA staff members have experience with or fully understand the complexity of building and managing a program as challenging as the ERA.
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From page 9... ...
In order to pursue technical development of the ERA, NARA should first hire a small team of first-rate information technologists with systems design expertise. The addition of a few employees with properly focused systems design expertise would greatly increase the likelihood that the ERA program will be successful.
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From page 10... ...
It is especially important that the data model the data types and related metadata conform to the architecture so that the digital data obtained by ingesting records into one of the early systems will carry forward into future evolutions. The initial systems should be selected and scoped for rapid deployment- this is the key to gaining early experience to inform the requirements of later systems.
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From page 11... ...
There is interest in preserving large but homogeneous collections of official military records scanned in TIFF image format when they are transfered to NARA's National Personnel Records Center. Confidentiality considerations and the imperative to provide ready access to veterans or next-of-kin would require careful attention to access controls.
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From page 12... ...
Pre-publication copy subject to further editorial correction 1 1 ., 6 S-12
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