NARA’s Challenges

As stated in NARA’s 10-year strategic plan covering the period of 1997 to 2007, NARA’s goals are to determine how to (1) preserve electronic records that the nation will need, (2) manage change, (3) stay abreast of technologies in federal agencies, and (4) use technologies to safeguard valuable information and make it more readily accessible. Agencies’ ERM efforts are competing for attention and resources with other information technology priorities, particularly in those agencies dealing with the Year 2000 problem. Agencies’ and NARA’s Actions to Implement ERM

On the basis of our discussions with NARA officials and officials of the four previously mentioned selected agencies and discussions at governmentwide conferences on the subject of records management, we learned that agencies vary in their records management programs and in their capabilities to implement ERM. This BPR effort should take 18 to 24 months. In addition to NARA’s planned BPR, NARA is taking some immediate action to revise its guidance to be more appropriate in today’s workplace environment. ERM Activities of Selected State and Foreign Governments

Our review of the ERM activities in four states and three foreign governments showed that approaches to ERM differ. The recommendations to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission and the Department of Information Resources included establishing administrative procedures and training to ensure that all staff work together to identify and manage electronic records to meet retention and archival preservation requirements, making library and archives standards applicable to all state records maintained in electronic format, seeking a legislative change in the Local Government Records Act so that the rules for managing electronic records can be amended to make these standards applicable to all local government records maintained in electronic format, jointly establishing and publishing guidelines for using standard functional requirements for electronic recordkeeping systems, studying the issues of retaining electronic records of enduring value for historical and research purposes to identify available options and associated costs with the intent of proposing legislative action, developing cost models for providing information to the public on-line, and working with the Office of the Attorney General to jointly establish rules and guidelines for providing and managing access to publicly available government information without compromising the privacy of citizens. For instance:
Policies and Procedures. Guidance. When paper or microfilm records are no longer needed at the agency level, those of archival value are transferred to a central storage facility. Conclusion

NARA and federal agencies are being challenged to effectively and efficiently manage electronic records in an environment of rapidly changing technology and increasing volume of electronic records. On the basis of our discussions with officials from NARA and four judgmentally selected agencies, we determined that ERM programs vary greatly across agencies. NARA had planned to conduct a baseline survey intended to obtain governmentwide information on agencies’ ERM programs, but NARA has now postponed the survey because it believes that it should first complete a BPR effort to improve guidance and assistance to agencies. Given that this effort is expected to take 18 to 24 months after it is started and the baseline survey is expected to take about 2 years, the baseline of governmentwide records management programs may not be established until perhaps sometime in calendar year 2003. Scope and Methodology

To obtain information on the challenges that confront the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and federal agencies as a result of their increased reliance on electronic media, we interviewed NARA and agency officials from four judgmentally selected agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS).
Why GAO Did This Study

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the preservation of electronic records, focusing on the: (1) challenges that confront the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and federal agencies as a result of their increased reliance on electronic media; (2) status of selected agencies' and NARA's implementation of electronic records management (ERM); and (3) ERM policies and procedures of selected other governments (state and foreign).

What GAO Found

GAO noted that: (1) NARA and federal agencies are faced with the substantial challenge of preserving electronic records in an era of rapidly changing technology; (2) in addition to handling the burgeoning volume of electronic records, NARA and the agencies must address several hardware and software issues to ensure that electronic records are properly created, permanently maintained, secured, and retrievable in the future; (3) also, NARA's and the agencies' ERM efforts are competing with other information technology priorities, particularly the need to ensure that their computers are year 2000 compliant; (4) NARA is responsible for providing guidance and assistance to agencies on how to maintain their official government records and for archiving those records once they are transferred to NARA; (5) the agencies are responsible for ensuring that records are created and preserved in accordance with the Federal Records Act; (6) no centralized source of information exists to document the extent to which agencies are fulfilling their ERM responsibilities under the act; (7) on the basis of GAO's discussions with officials from NARA and four judgmentally selected agencies, GAO found that plans and capabilities for ERM vary greatly across agencies; (8) NARA has recently postponed a planned baseline survey that was intended to obtain governmentwide information on agencies' ERM programs because NARA believes that it should first complete a business process reengineering (BPR) effort; (9) this BPR effort, which is intended to assess and potentially alter NARA's guidance to and interaction with agencies, is expected to take 18 to 24 months; (10) GAO believes that the baseline survey information is critical to ensuring that the BPR results are relevant to the ERM situations at agencies and the survey should not be postponed; (11) these baseline data are needed to meet one of NARA's stated strategic planning goals to stay abreast of technologies in the agencies; (12) even while planning its BPR effort, NARA is taking some immediate action to address the agencies' needs for ERM guidance and direction; (13) state and foreign governments are addressing similar ERM challenges; and (14) from GAO's limited judgmental sample of state and foreign governments, it is clear that these governments and the federal government often differ in: (a) the organization of their archival activities; (b) their philosophies on centralization versus decentralization of recordkeeping responsibilities; and (c) their computer hardware and software capabilities.