Fred Kaplan: The urgent need to fix federal archiving policies
Here's an idea for a good second step: Force the federal agencies to file and maintain all the records they're creating now, so that in the future when citizens file FOIA requests to declassify documents, they won't receive a form letter that reads,"Sorry, no such documents exist."
A 2005 report by the National Archives and Records Administration—which was declassified just this week under a FOIA suit filed by the National Security Archive, a private research organization at George Washington University—concluded that, in an era when nearly all records are stored on hard drives, rather than typed on paper, the raw bits of history are evaporating.
"Electronic records," the study found,"are generally not disposed of in accordance" with federal regulations. In particular, many e-mails are"being destroyed prematurely," for several reasons.
First, some officials write e-mail on their personal computers—perhaps for convenience, perhaps to evade the rules—and fail to turn in those files. Second,"because electronic records are less tangible than paper records," the report notes, officials"often do not consider them to be records needing to be filed and retired properly." Third, in many offices, the job of"records custodian" rotates frequently; it is often left vacant for a long time; and when the vacancy is filled, National Archives officials aren't notified so that they can come to train the new gatekeeper. In short, expertise has greatly declined. Fourth, the number of records custodians has also declined"substantially over the past decade."
Finally—and this is simply stunning—the National Archives' technology branch is so antiquated that it cannot process some of the most common software programs. Specifically, the study states, the archives"is still unable to accept Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint slides."
This is a huge lapse. ...
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Kaplan on NPR