FADGI – or the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative – has some important implications for federal records management.
Representing an effort by a group of federal agencies to simplify and standardize records management guidelines, FADGI establishes baseline quality measures that records managers can use when creating and submitting electronic records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). We previously wrote a primer on FADGI here.
NARA is clearly a fan of the guidelines. In December 2020, it even proposed a new rule that would require all permanent records submitted to NARA to comply with FADGI and meet three-star quality rules. But FADGI can be a little confusing to understand. It establishes four different quality levels based on star ratings. How can an agency know what the quality levels mean and which they should be using for different records?
1. One-star quality – generally around 150 pixels per inch (ppi) – is intended for reference-only applications that do not require images of sufficient quality to be used for optical character recognition (OCR).
2. Two-star quality – around 200 to 300 ppi – is appropriate images that are only meant to be used for informational purposes and should typically not be used for optical character recognition.
Note that “images” here means not only actual pictures but also scans of physical printed documents. The one- and two-star ratings are intended to produce digital imagery that is more referential than usable. In other words, staff might refer back to them for informational purposes, but they aren’t high quality enough to be reproducible or usable in place of original documents. For example, a lower-quality image might enable staff to know what an old map looked like for research purposes but most likely would not preserve sufficient detail or resolution to be usable in an active survey of the terrain.
3. Three-star quality – 300 to 400 ppi – works well for most use cases, including those that require a good quality image that can be used for both commercial and personal printing. This is the quality level that NARA would like agencies to use when submitting permanent records. At this level, the image quality is capable of capturing details like paper condition, ink type, etc.
4. Four-star quality – 400+ ppi – represents the most advanced technology in image capture. They can be used for almost any purpose and can fully replace the original record.
NARA favors three- and four-star rated records because they can serve as full replacements (sometimes called reproducible masters) if/when the original physical records are destroyed.
It can be challenging to meet the requirements of the FADGI guidelines due to the complexity of the task and the level of experience required to implement the necessary solutions. The pixels per inch metric described above is only one dimension of FADGI quality. To determine the actual quality level, FADGI uses a software system called the Digital Imaging Conformance Evaluation program, or DICE. Thus, it’s important when creating digital records that the electronic records management (ERM) system possess the right features and specs to be able to produce FADGI-compliant digital records.
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