Most of the electronic records in AAD were created by Federal agencies to meet their own program or business needs. These records were not created with history or general public access in mind.

As a result, some contain typographical and other data entry errors. You will occasionally find, for example, misspelled names, inaccurate dates (e.g., February 31), codes that are not identified in a code list, and invalid data for the type of data field (e.g., monetary information in a date field). As an archives, NARA's role, however, is to preserve the integrity of the records that Federal agencies transfer to it for archival preservation, even if the records include objective inaccuracies. For this reason, NARA does not correct or revise accessioned records.

Similar data may also be entered in a variety of ways. For example, one data file may display a date in the order of month, day, and year, or mm/dd/yyyy. Another data file may order the date by year, month, and day, or yy/mm/dd. NARA has designed AAD to accommodate such data anomalies by providing you with a consistent way in which to search the data, while ensuring that the data remains unaltered. For example, whenever possible, you may construct searches by date using the standard mm/dd/yyyy format, even though the actual field against which they are constructing a search might be structured as yy/mm/dd. The "value" column on the results page will still show the original date format. In some cases, however, the variety of formats in which date information was recorded did not allow for this type of accommodation.

Copies of all data files included in AAD are also available for reproduction on a cost-recovery basis. To find information on ordering electronic records go to the Ordering Information for Electronic Records page.