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ERA Receives Records from Bush Administration
The National Archives is well on its way to loading the electronic records of President George W. Bush into the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system,according to Acting Archivist of the United States Adrienne Thomas. To date, more than 85% of the total volume has been ingested.
ERA is the National Archives' signature program to ensure government records with lasting value remain accessible into the future.
The incorporation of Bush records is the second increment of the five increments planned for ERA. Called Search and Access, this second stage was developed to take in and provide search and retrieval functions for key electronic records from the George W. Bush administration.
The Presidential Records Act, 44 USC 2001 (PRA) gives the National Archives the legal custody of and responsibility for these records and the task of responding to special access requirements immediately after the end of an administration. On January 20 when President Barack Obama was sworn into office, the National Archives received legal custody of the records created by the George W. Bush administration. In an unprecedented move, the data was delivered directly to ERA's facilities on storage area network hardware, significantly easing the transfer process. This process was made possible by intense collaboration between National Archives archivists, the ERA development contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., and White House administration IT personnel.
In the following months, National Archives IT specialists began the process of loading approximately 77 terabytes of data into the ERA system and preparing them for access. Seventy-seven terabytes is roughly 35 times the amount of data received from the Clinton administration, which itself was many times that of the previous George H.W. Bush administration.
Currently, the use of the system is limited to presidential libraries staff processing the records and responding to special access requests as needed. Presidential records become subject to Freedom of Information Act requests five years after the end of the presidential administration as specified in the PRA.
ERA is being developed incrementally with the support of Lockheed Martin Corp., with main system capabilities being developed and released sequentially and designed to be flexible and interchangeable. The first increment of ERA, known as ERA Base, deals with the lifecycle management and transfer of federal records.
ARMA International Washington Policy Brief, October 2009
