Archives reports progress on road to digital ERA

By Max Cacas
Reporter
FederalNewsRadio

Its been four years since the National Archives and Records Administration first began building ERA, the Electonic Records Archive. The program is designed to digitize existing government paper records and to make electronic archives items available digitally.

ERA is a complex, and multiple-year project to move the government beyond simply warehousing paper. The ERA project reached an important milestone recently, according to Assistant Archivist and NARA Chief Information Officer Martha Morphy.

"We have transferred the electronic records," she told Federal News Radio, "from the (George W.) Bush '43' Administration into the system, and we're able to provide access to those records to those who have legal rights to the records."

Its a process that began on Inauguration Day with the first deliveries of records, including electronic, paper video and audio, and others,from the Bush White House evan as the Obama Administration was moving in.

The Archives has so far entered 77 terabytes of data from the Bush presidency into the ERA system. That's more than 35 times the amount of data received from the Clinton White House.

Morphy says they originally estimated that the Bush electronic archive would amount to between 60-100 terabytes of data. "There were some bumps in the road, but we worked very carefully with our contractor, Lockheed Martin, and the White House staff, to look for technical solutions for the transfer of those records, and I am pleased to report that the process went very well."

With 85 percent of the Bush Administration records now in the ERA system, Morphy says the Archives is on schedule to complete digitizing the complete record of the Bush administration by the end of this month.

In one case, Morphy told reporters that e-mail from the Bush White House was converted from Microsoft's Exchange server format into an unspecified "open source" format, in order to make all the e-mail messages of administration staff searchable.

David Kepley, Federal Records Transition Officer for the Archives ERA project says that along with the Bush material, the Archives has also been hard at work entering into ERA what he described as a "mountain" of other government information:

To date, we have ingested more than 67 gigabytes of material, representing 1300 accession transactions. Most of this comes from our own materials which we've been collecting since 1969, but some of it comes from our four pilot agencies (participating in the ERA project), as well as materials that came to us from other agencies. The agencies we've been working with on a pilot basis over the last several years are:

• The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
• The National Nuclear Security Administration
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics
• The Naval Oceanographic office.

Kepley also says that in the next several months, they hope to expand their pilot program to include 25 additional federal agencies, and rigorously test the ERA systems ability to electronically archive agency records in virtually any electronic, multimedia, or paper format.

By 2011, he says, the plan is to make the use of ERA as a records storage device mandatory for all Federal agencies.

Still to come in next two years of development of the National Archives ERA integrating the records of the U.S. Congress, and the Supreme Court into the Electronic Records Archive.

On the Web:

National Archives: Bush Electronic Records Now Part of the Electronic Records Archives (press release)

National Archives: Electronic Records Archives

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