New report finds Federal electronic recordkeeping “abysmal” and new legislation in the works

Sorry to post again so quickly–please don’t overlook the previous post which linked to NARA’s background documents on the web harvest issue.

But I just couldn’t wait to share the link to this story from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington blog. I’ll quote it here at length:

You wouldn’t know it’s the 21st century by the way the federal government handles electronic record-keeping. It’s abysmal.

CREW documents the state of affairs in our new report, Record Chaos: The Deplorable State of Electronic Record Keeping in the Federal Government, concluding that the federal government is severely mismanaging its electronic records. “Record Chaos” is based on months of research and the results of an on-line survey. Released today, the full report and its findings and recommendations are available here.

Also today, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will release proposed legislation amending federal record keeping laws to require agencies and the president to address this government-wide problem. Unfortunately, the proposal is anemic and fails to make the substantial changes necessary to bring the federal government into the 21st century. CREW has prepared a comprehensive analysis of the legislation available in pdf here.

Any solution must extend be far beyond the congressional proposal. Despite the ready availability of off-the-shelf products that would allow federal agencies to manage their records electronically, agencies continue to cling to outdated, inefficient and ineffective paper record keeping systems. The federal government has fallen woefully behind its private sector counterparts and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has failed to affirmatively assist agencies in developing and implementing records management policies as the Federal Records Act requires.

I don’t know anything about this group and I haven’t had time to read their report, so by passing this information along I’m not intending to endorse it. I also haven’t seen the legislation posted anywhere on the web, so if anyone can help with a link to it (once it’s publicly available) that would be great. Full text of legislation is available here. It looks like it applies to both Federal and Presidential records, so this should be an interesting discussion and highly relevant to all archivists and historians.

2 Comments

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  By ArchivesNext, April 17, 2008 @ 6:28 am

  Full text of the legislation, summary and press release are available at the bottom of this page:

  http://oversight.house.gov/story.asp?ID=1875

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1. Archives Issues | New legislation and report on Federal and Presidential recordkeeping — April 17, 2008 @ 7:47 am

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