The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has long been the custodian of the nation’s most precious historical documents and records. In recent years, NARA has been at the forefront of a significant shift as federal agencies across the country have raced to meet the June 30, 2024, deadline for converting to electronic records management under OMB Memorandum M-23-07.
However, it’s not just federal agencies alone who have been working hard implementing and managing this conversion to electronic records management. NARA too has been working intensively on its own ambitious projects aimed at supporting a more efficient and effective digital-first future.
In Process: Opening a New Digitization Center & Digitizing Mountains of Old Records
Notably, NARA recently opened a new state-of-the-art digitization center. “For the last year and a half or so, there was a renovation effort in our archives building at College Park,” says Denise Henderson, director of digitization for the Office of Research Services at NARA. “And we’ve renovated 18,000 square feet and established a modern state-of-the-art digitization center. This facility is at the heart of NARA’s massive digitization effort, which aims to convert vast quantities of older records in its care into digital formats.
According to Collene Shogan, the eleventh archivist of the U.S., the new facility will provide “a tenfold increase in our in-house scanning capacity and will help us make millions of original records accessible online for Americans everywhere.” That increase in scanning capacity is pivotal to NARA’s own digitization efforts. Individual federal agencies aren’t the only ones with backlogs of records to convert from analog to electronic formats. NARA itself is in the process of digitizing half a billion analog records, including legal decisions, property records, and other non-classified records.
Moving Forward: Processing the Recent ‘Surge’ of Records Transfer Requests
In meeting NARA’s June 30 deadline, federal agencies inundated the National Archives and federal records centers with nearly 1 million cubic feet of records. “The surge was real,” Lisa Haralampus, director of records management policy and outreach at NARA, told the Federal News Network. Now, NARA will likely spend the next “year or two” working through backlogs of requests submitted before the deadline.
Looking Forward: Preparing for the Future of Federal Records Management
Finally, NARA is eyeing the policy and technological advancements needed to ensure federal agencies can continue to meet the inevitable changes in how records are created, used, and stored over time. “[We need] to move on beyond just digitization and provide automation into the processes themselves,” Ron Swecker, records officer at the Department of Transportation, told Federal News Network.
To that end, NARA is continuing to review and update the guidance it provides to agencies. For example, it is currently exploring something called ‘zero click’ records management, or an AI- and automation-driven set of processes that free rank-and-file end-users from having to do, well, anything related specifically to records management, preservation, or disposition functions.
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