About ERA

Background Information

Electronic Records Challenge
NARA's Strategic Response
Archives of the Future

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 e-mail 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.

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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.

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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.

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ERA Status

"On June 27th, 2008, ERA reached Initial Operating Capability and began to be used for NARA business on the 30th. In its initial stage, the new system will support the basic process of determining how long federal agencies need to keep records and whether the records should be preserved in the National Archives afterwards. ERA will support this process for all federal records, whether they are paper, film, electronic, or other media. In July 2008, the National Archives will start moving approximately three and a half million computer files into ERA. These historically-valuable electronic records range from databases about World War II soldiers to the State Department's central files on foreign affairs. The records eventually will be accessible online in ERA."