Report says NARA lacks e-records skills.When it comes to electronic records and future archiving technology, the National Archives National Archives, official depository for records of the U.S. federal government, established in 1934 by an act of Congress. Although displeasure concerning the method of keeping national records was voiced in Congress as early as 1810, the United States continued and Records Administration (NARA Nara (nä`rä), city (1990 pop. 349,349), capital of Nara prefecture, S Honshu, Japan. An ancient cultural and religious center, it was founded in 706 by imperial decree and was modeled after Chang'an (see Xi'an), the capital of T'ang China. ) apparently has a lot of work to do. At least 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. a report by the National Academies' Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (NACSTB). The NACSTB report warned that NARA lacks the technical experience needed to find a way to deal with the growing number of electronic records created across the federal government. It further states that the U.S. government's primary record-keeping agency does not have the information technology (IT) know-how to understand electronic records management. According to the report: "In addition to needing a quick ramp-up in the IT expertise necessary to oversee the early phases of procurement The fancy word for "purchasing." The procurement department within an organization manages all the major purchases. , NARA faces a longer-term need for a more pervasive culture change--IT skills related to preservation will need to be a core competence Core competence Primary area of expertise. Narrowly defined fields or tasks at which a company or business excels. Primary areas of specialty. throughout the organization." In short, NARA needs more internal technical expertise in areas such as enterprise architecture and information security. The report encourages NARA to move forward with a careful, modular procurement plan, starting with many small pilot programs to address focused aspects of the overall problem and then pulling together the pieces in the future. It also recommends that NARA * work with other archiving programs See archive program. and organizations on common digital preservation needs * gather more information about the electronic records that need to be preserved before moving forward with a modular procurement * address the lack of IT expertise within NARA by training current employees, hiring new ones with specialized skills, and contracting out for support Through its Electronic Records Archives (ERA) program, NAP& is working to develop a way to manage the rapidly increasing number of electronic records being created and stored now and in the future. The volume of e-records the ERA program expects to receive from agencies between 2005 and 2010 is estimated at almost a petabyte One quadrillion bytes (one trillion kilobytes). Also PB, Pbyte and P-byte. See peta, binary values and space/time. (unit) petabyte - 2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes = 1024 terabytes or roughly 10^15 bytes. 1024 petabytes is one exabyte. of data. One petabyte is 1,024 terabytes, which is now the largest term agencies use to describe their data volumes. In addition, NARA expects to receive almost 11 petabytes worth of records by 2014. |
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