Digital Preservation for the Nation

By Chris Zammarelli, The Brookings Institution

Listen to this session.

Digital preservation of electronic government documents is a vital task of the federal government, but it also presents unique challenges.  Rita Cacas (Presentation), Communications Officer for the U.S. National Archives' Electronic Records Archives (ERA) project, and Mike Wash (Presentation), Chief Technology Officer for the U.S. Government Printing Office, presented on two ways the government is tackling this undertaking.

Cacas began with an overview of National Archives and Records Administration's mission, which is to "provide access [to government information] for the life of the republic."  In 1995, Ken Thibodeau, then-director of NARA's Center for Electronic Records, reported to the Archivist of the United States that it was heading towards "mission failure" because it was not keeping up with the increasing volume of the government's electronic documents.  It became critical for NARA to develop a means for electronic records preservation.

Knowing how huge this the project was, the agency began creating research partnerships with organizations like the Library of Congress, the University of Maryland, IEEE, and NASA to work on the digital aspects of the project.  ERA became an official project in 2000, and Congress made its budget separate from NARA's regular operating costs.