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 agency of the United States government within the executive branch, charged with the preservation and documentation of government and historical records. It is also task ...

(NARA) to preserve electronic records as part of the U.S. government's broader

records management Records management, also known as records and information management, is an organizational function devoted to the information management, management of information in an organization throughout its records life-cycle, life cycle, from the time of ...

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 Kenneth Francis Thibodeau (born 1945) is an American specialist in electronic records management who worked for many years at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). He was responsible for development of the pioneering DoD 5015.02 ...

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. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest (Washington, D.C.), NW in Washington, D.C., it has served as the residence of every U.S. president ...

would hand over staff

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

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 The Lockheed Martin Corporation is an American Arms industry, defense and aerospace manufacturer with worldwide interests. It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta on March 15, 1995. It is headquartered in North ...

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 his narrow electoral college vict ...

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 un ...

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 Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

to document those records, preserving those records, and allowing access to those records. This adapts the traditional work of

archival processing Archival processing is the act of surveying, arranging, describing, and performing basic preservation activities on the recorded material of an individual, family, or organization after they are permanently transferred to an archive. A person engag ...

to digital records, a form of

digital curation Digital curation is the selection, Preservation (library and archival science), preservation, maintenance, collection, and archiving of Digital data, digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains, and adds value to repositories of digita ...

. As of 2012, federal agencies also used ERA to submit proposed record

retention schedule A retention schedule is a listing of organizational information types, or series of information in a manner which facilitates the understanding and application of the identified and approved retention period, and other information retention aspects ...

s, 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 "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

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

External links

ERA official website

NARA official website
{{authority control Archives in the United States Digital Library project

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

National Archives and Records Administration Government agencies established in 2000 World Digital Library Independent agencies of the United States government Records management State archives World Digital Library partners