FBI works to better manage its records. (Up front: news, trends & analysis).After recent criticism of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) records management skills, the bureau has begun working to clean up its act by creating a records management division. "We need to figure out how to manage our case files effectively," William L. Hooton, assistant director of the FBI's new records management division, recently told Government Computer News (GCN GCN Government Computer News GCN Gamecube Nintendo (gaming) GCN GIG (Global Information Grid) Computing Nodes GCN GRB Coordinates Network GCN Gospel Communications Network ) (www.gcn.com). "We have no real, in my opinion, records management system at the bureau." According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. GCN, the FBI currently is converting 750,000 documents a day to electronic format in an effort to build an inventory of its records. The bureau is scanning its records at a facility dubbed dub 1 tr.v. dubbed, dub·bing, dubs 1. To tap lightly on the shoulder by way of conferring knighthood. 2. To honor with a new title or description. 3. the DocLab and is employing a "dirty" optical character reader optical character reader n. Abbr. OCR A device used for optical character recognition. optical character reader n → lecteur m optique (OCR OCR in full optical character recognition Scanning and comparison technique intended to identify printed text or numerical data. It avoids the need to retype already printed material for data entry. ) process instead of a corrected OCR process to speed up operations. "We just don't have the time right now to do very high-quality OCR," Hooton said. The purpose of scanning the records is to create databases to which the bureau can apply data-mining techniques. GCN reported that the FBI consolidated almost 1,000 employees into the records management division, bringing together staff from 22 organizations to form the largest division at bureau headquarters. At a recent meeting of the National Capital Chapter of the Association for Information and Image Management The Association for Information and Image Management or AIIM (pronounced aim) is an international industry association focused on enterprise content management (ECM). in Arlington, Virginia, Hooton explained the mammoth records Founded in 1989 in Carrboro, North Carolina, Mammoth Records was one of the premiere independent record labels of the 1990s. Its roster featured such diverse talent as Antenna, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, The Blake Babies, Chainsaw Kittens, Dash Rip Rock, Dillon Fence, Far Too project. According to Hooton, the FBI will conduct an inventory of its records and separate them into three groups: records to be destroyed, records that haven't been requested within the past five years but must be kept, and records that have been requested within the past five years. The second group of records reportedly will be stored in offline systems, while the records requested more recently will be stored in the records management application system that the division is building. This will be a significant improvement for the FBI, which has taken several hits for its inability to manage its documents due to the lack of a records management system. In fact, the bureau's recordkeeping was lambasted by the Justice Department's Inspector General Glen Fine at Senate hearings in 2002. |
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