Agencies urged to set standards for electronic records

Public records experts said on Wednesday that the government should speed the development of a process for archiving digital documents such as e-mail and computer files, and it should set policies to determine what constitutes a record worth preserving.

The public and private sectors' increasing reliance on computer networks, software and the Internet to process business transactions has created challenges in saving information, said Catherine Teti, managing director of knowledge services at the General Accounting Office.

While agencies are deploying new systems to electronically sign and send documents and other data, for example, there are no guidelines as to how much of that information should be saved and no classifications for the type of data that constitutes a record.

"We need to focus on what is essential" because not everything can be saved, Teti said at a panel discussion on digital record-keeping hosted by the software maker Adobe Systems.

As the cost of storing data has decreased, organizations are tempted to retain everything, said John Mancini, president of the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM).

"That makes the management [of records] that much more difficult," Teti added.

The question of how best to preserve documents has a new urgency, panelists said. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, leaders recognize that organizations require disaster-recovery plans and a means to preserve information, including cases where an office building or other physical structure might be destroyed, Mancini noted.

Additionally, new e-government mandates from the White House are compelling agencies to address the issue of information archives because they do not have resources to physically save paper-based data permanently.

Panelists agreed that electronic storage of documents would be cost-effective but said that without clear policies, technical standards and resources, most agencies are struggling with a move to go "paperless" because they fear the data cannot always be accessed reliably.

The National Archives and Records Administration is charged with providing guidance for record-keeping within the federal government. But there is growing concern among federal agents charged with managing government records and documents who say there is "insufficient guidance" from NARA on how to retain information in a manner consistent with new technologies, Teti said.

Additionally, agencies often lack resources to develop an infrastructure for archiving e-documents, panelists noted.

Efforts are underway within the government to address digital archiving. NARA is working on the issue, panelists said, and the Library of Congress is engaged in a collaborative initiative to preserve digital content over the long term.

Meanwhile, Mancini's group, AIIM, is helping to establish Adobe's portable document file as an international standard for storing and retrieving documents in a predictable manner.