The Electronic Records Archives (ERA) is a program of the United States
National Archives and Records Administration
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is an " independent federal agency of the United States government within the executive branch", charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It ...
(NARA) to preserve electronic records as part of the U.S. government's broader
records management process. The program began in 1998
and started to accept records in 2008. As of 2017, NARA was working to overhaul the system in an effort called "ERA 2.0."
History
Efforts by U.S. government archivists to preserve electronic records date to the 1960s but the task took on heightened importance toward the end of the 20th century, as the volume and variety of government-produced digital records expanded.
[Worsham, James]
"How the National Archives Evolved Over 75 Years of Change and Challenges,"
''Prologue,'' Vol. 41, No. 2 (Summer 2009). According to
Kenneth Thibodeau when he was the ERA program's director, the idea of an initiative to better manage electronic records took shape in the 1990s as NARA officials looked ahead to the expected end of the
Bill Clinton administration in January 2001, when the
White House
The White House is the official residence and workplace of the president of the United States. It is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., and has been the residence of every U.S. president since John Adams in ...
would hand over staff
email
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...
messages for preservation: "We estimated the transfer of something in the realm of forty million e-mail messages. No system in the agency could handle that volume. Even if we expanded existing systems a hundredfold, we still could not handle the simple workload of copying those files."
In 1998,
NARA launched the ERA program, and an office was established in 2000.
The agency released a draft request for proposals in August 2003, followed by a final version in 2004.
A $308 million, six-year contract to build the system was awarded to
Lockheed Martin in September 2005.
In 2008, the ERA system began accepting records from four pilot agencies, and in January 2009 it began to take in
George W. Bush administration
George W. Bush's tenure as the 43rd president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2001, and ended on January 20, 2009. Bush, a Republican from Texas, took office following a narrow victory over Democratic ...
records.
Development of the system ended in 2011 and within a few years it was storing hundreds of
terabyte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
s of electronic records.
Functions
NARA has described ERA as a "system of systems" with four primary functions: accepting electronic records from government bodies, assigning
metadata to document those records, preserving those records, and allowing access to those records.
This adapts the traditional work of
archival processing to digital records, a form of
digital curation Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets.
Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished ...
.
As of 2012, federal agencies also used ERA to submit proposed record
retention schedules, and NARA used the system to review and either approve or reject those schedules. Schedules are used to determine how long records should be retained by the U.S. government before they are destroyed, with only some records deemed worthy of permanent preservation. Only a small fraction of government records, 1% to 3%, are preserved in perpetuity by NARA.
ERA 2.0
In 2012, NARA decided the ERA system required "extensive modernization and refactoring," which would come in a project called ERA 2.0.
Among other things, the project would incorporate
cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...
technology and an
Agile software approach.
The new system will include a Digital Processing Environment to accept and process digital materials, and a Digital Object Repository to store materials.
A pilot program began in 2015 and the production release was scheduled for 2018.
Notes
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External links
ERA official websiteNARA official website
{{authority control
Archives in the United States
Digital Library project
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...
National Archives and Records Administration
Government agencies established in 2000
World Digital Library