Obama Orders Federal Agencies To Digitize All Records 186
Lucas123 writes "President Obama this week issued a directive to all federal agencies to upgrade records management processes from paper-based systems that have been around since President Truman's administration to electronic records systems with Web 2.0 capabilities. Agencies have four months to come up with plans to improve their records keeping. Part of the directive is to have the National Archives and Records Administration store all long-term records and oversee electronic records management efforts in other agencies. Unfortunately, NARA doesn't have a stellar record itself (PDF) in rolling out electronic records projects. Earlier this year, due to cost overruns and project mismanagement, NARA announced it was ending a 10-year effort to create an electronic records archive."
They'd better do something (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.archives.gov/st-louis/military-personnel/fire-1973.html [archives.gov]
Re:You've been smoking the hope (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I went and read the executive order here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/74042394/Managing-Government-Records-November-28-2011 [scribd.com]
which itself says nothing about Web 2.0 itself. Nor about moving to the cloud. The requirements laid out there are business level, and basically translate to the following: "You have 120 days to come up with system level requirements to move our data from hard copy to soft copy."
With this said, the section from the order that you're quoting is 2-b-i. It refers to the need to have a unified solution for archiving all existing electronic communication. Would you prefer that every department and agency have its own? And here I thought you might be in favor of cutting costs and efficiency.
Finally, your link shows that Obama has issued 17 signing statements in 3 years. That's about 6 per year. Bush issued 161 over 8 years. That's 20 per year. The number of executive orders is similar. And honestly, the Democrats in congress didn't play the cloture games that the Republicans play now. They made a huge stink about the ONE appointment that the Democrats tried to block (remember the chants of "up ur down! up ur down!"). Now, the Republicans won't let a damn thing to the floor of the Senate for a vote that doesn't explicitly further their causes. In other words, false equivalance fail.
Re:seriously, how hard is this? (Score:4, Informative)
I used to work for a DMS software company at the corporate level and while the systems are on everything from elementary schools to health care providers to governments, the retrieval is pretty damn nice IF the system is set up properly. A properly set up system for a small pizzashop takes an hour or 2, a gov agency could take weeks or months to perfect. But the user side of things was a breeze.
In the Archival Trenches... (Score:5, Informative)
As a professional historian who has worked in the National Archives in College Park, MD and at four different presidential libraries, which incidentally are also managed by NARA, I need to interject that this is an immense costly but valuable project.
Remember "the warehouse" from the Indiana Jones movies? NARA is a little like that in terms of size but are better organized. Aisle upon aisle, shelf upon shelf, row upon row, room upon room, floor upon floor, building upon building of neatly indexed banker's boxes with labelled folders of documents. The labels may have been checked by the archivists at NARA, but they may also simply be the labels affixed to the records by the source federal agency. The individual documents in folders are almost never labelled. In the course of my work, I gathered 30k digital pictures of documents over the course of two months. The acquisition process sounds deceptively easy. Look in the index, find key words and request boxes from the archivist. Then you look through folders to locate individual documents. In point of fact, I probably visually scanned 3M pages to see if they were "interesting" and photo worthy for future research, usually taking only a few seconds per page to make a snap judgement. My decisions on which boxes of documents to request were far more time consuming. What is the right keyword for talking about computers in government in 1970? If you said "information automation" then you would be right. A few presidential (Ford especially) libraries have updated electronic files for indexing which is a huge advantage.
On my trips to the archives, it was interesting to see both professionals and amateurs using a range of technologies. I saw really old school researchers using 3x5 note cards and taking notes on legal pads. They sometimes supplemented their work by photocopying really important documents at $.75/copy. Some researchers avoided this cost by using flat bed scanners which they carried in with them. Still other researchers brought in high end digital cameras and tripods. I used a digital camera freehanded. All of these people still need to find a way to actually get to physical proximity with the records. Digitalization would open up a new era in research.
On the metadata issue, most of these records already have copious amounts of metadata recorded in well-established fields that are used by NARA.
On the OCR issue, some documents have hand-written notes on them which would not be machine readable and sometimes are not human readable. It is likely that the documents will have to be digitally scanned and flagged if handwriting is detected.
Making these records available to the general public would be a huge advantage to anyone interested in government and US history. Come to think of it, in terms of size and complexity, it would be a worthy challenge for Google. U.S. government documents run back to the founding of the country and the number of documents only increases over time.