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GCN Home > July 30, 2001 issue

Digital data downpour

Agencies wrestle with how to store electronic records

BY RICHARD W. WALKER | GCN STAFF

The explosion of electronic data across government is rocking the once staid world of records management.

Few know this better than the government’s archivist, John Carlin.

“The whole ball game of records management is changing dramatically. The change is huge,” said Carlin, director of the National Archives and Records Administration. “We’ve gone from file clerks who would help people get their paper filed in an appropriate place to everyone at their desktop being their own file clerk.”

John Carlin
Government archivist John Carlin says there needs to be a sense of urgency among agencies about digital record-keeping.
For agencies, the technology and policy issues surrounding digital records are snowballing at a time when the deadline looms for implementing the Government Paperwork Elimination Act.

GPEA requires that citizens be able to conduct the majority of their business with the government online by October 2003.

For records managers, GPEA will mean an avalanche of digital records in multiple forms to be managed and stored.

“We cannot keep pace with the explosion of records,” Steve Colo, deputy assistant director and chief information officer of the Secret Service, said at a NARA conference earlier this year.

Record-keeping growth

“It never stops,” said Kenneth Thibodeau, director of NARA’s two-year-old Electronic Records Archives program. “The growth continues as far as you’re going into the future.”

It’s no wonder that Carlin says electronic records pose the biggest challenge ever faced by records managers. Moreover, he said there should be a sense of urgency, such as the one that permeated the year 2000 effort, about tackling the problem.

Would he apply the word crisis to the current state of digital record-keeping?

“Absolutely,” he said. “You have to remember that the government is charging ahead with electronic commerce, electronic government and GPEA, setting all sorts of targets for agencies to be more and more electronic, ignoring the fact that balanced with this ought to be: How are we going to keep the records?”

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