• ERA Vision
  
  
• ERA Infopaper
  
  
• Background Information
  
  
• ERA Documentation
  
  
• NARA Papers and Presentations

ERA Vision

The electronic records challenge is formidable, but as an agency, NARA is committed to addressing this challenge head on. NARA’s vision is to create a system that will authentically preserve and provide access to any kind of electronic record, free from dependency on any specific hardware or software, enabling NARA to carry out its mission into the future.

Vivid Description

1. We will be a leader in innovation in electronic records archiving.
2. In coordination with our Federal partners, we will develop policy and technical guidance to enable responsible electronic records creation and management.
3. With help from our research partners, we will develop and maintain the technical capability to capture, preserve, describe, access and appropriately dispose of any Government electronic record.
4. We will manage a coherent, nationwide, and sustainable system for permanent archival electronic records of the Federal Government.
5. We will develop the capability to manage Federal agency electronic records within the NARA records center system.
6. We will ensure that anyone, at anytime, from any place, has access to the best tools to find and use the records we preserve.
7. Our staff will be capable and consistent users of the electronic tools at every point of the life cycle.
8. We will sustain widespread support from all our stakeholders and customers by listening to their needs, meeting their requirements, and seeking their feedback.

ERA Infopaper

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Background Information

• Electronic Records Challenge
  
  
• NARA’s Strategic Response
  
  
• Archives of the Future
  
  
• ERA Status

The Electronic Records Challenge

More and more we communicate by computer. That means our records—records of critical importance to every one of us—such as email messages and word-processing documents are increasingly electronic.

In the Federal Government, electronic records are as indispensable as their paper predecessors to document citizens' rights, the actions for which officials are accountable, and the nation's history. Effective democracy depends on access to such records.

Electronic records, however, pose a critical challenge to NARA. In order to fulfill its mandate to provide ready access to essential evidence to the citizens and the Government of the United States, NARA must address and solve the dilemma of preserving and accessing electronic records that are complex by nature, diverse in format and exponentially increasing in volume. The rate of technological obsolescence is such that records created and accessed even two years ago may now be unreadable. Unless this challenge is confronted and surmounted, there will be no National Archives for the digital era.

NARA’s Strategic Response

The ERA project was launched in 1998. The first three years were spent essentially doing research in order to understand the problems better and to see what might be possible. Our research activities have all been collaborative with other Federal Government agencies, state governments, computer scientists, other national archives, academia, and private industry. One of these collaborations was in the development of the Open Archival Information Standard (OAIS).

ERA will be an OAIS, but the OAIS standard addresses any kind of information kept for any length of time. It doesn't say anything specific about records. We have to add the requirements for records and archives.

In July 1999, when John Carlin, Archivist of the United States, gave the ERA Project preliminary approval, NARA took on a task as potentially complex as the construction of our state-of-the-art building, the National Archives at College Park, MD. There are fundamental differences between constructing a building and developing a meta-computing system, but in ERA we effectively are building the archives of the future. Trends of the last decade leave little doubt that we are moving towards digital Government. To cope with and record it, a new kind of structure is needed for the continuing archival tasks of assembling, managing, preserving, and providing access to records.

Archives of the Future

Unlike our College Park building, the archives of the future need not be confined to a geographic location. Digital technology makes possible an archives that is truly national in scope, one that enables people everywhere to gain access to archival holdings through connections to the Internet. But in other ways, ERA will be functionally equivalent to a traditional physical building.

Electronic records collections may be accessible in different locations, but ERA must provide a place to which they can be transmitted by records creators. It must include workspaces where NARA staff can examine records and establish control over them. It must provide reliable technology for storing the records over long periods of time. It must make access to records readily available to users. And it must enable us to preserve records threatened by technological obsolescence and media fragility.

Also like our College Park building, our ERA will require substantial resources, careful and thorough planning, and sustained commitment on the part of management and staff. Doubtless we will encounter challenges in the creation of ERA and shortcomings in the structure we now conceive for it. But ERA will provide opportunities for doing things we have never done before, and for doing things better than ever.

"Building the Archives of the Future"

For more details on the advances in preserving electronic records at NARA click on the above link to the D-Lib Magazine article by Ken Thibodeau, Director of the ERA Program.

ERA Status

Much remains to be done before the vision of ERA becomes a reality. The necessary projects and tasks fall in two large categories: designing the structure and building it. ERA design activities involve researching and addressing fundamental questions in computer science, engineering, and archival theory; elaborating the archival business model that should be implemented in an ERA system; further articulating the information management architecture that needs to be put into place; and determining the specific system components. ERA has established key research partnerships to facilitate the process. These activities will determine how the system will be built. Actual building will start with final acceptance of a comprehensive design along with a plan for developing, implementing, operating, and maintaining NARA's ERA application. Our goal is to have a functional subset of the system operational in 2007.