Losing Our Memory/Beyond stewardship

by David S. Ferriero

We have a lot of federal records at the National Archives, and I suspect that despite our best efforts the number will continue to increase exponentially. Do you know the sign on the McDonald’s restaurants? Eighteen years after the first one opened, they put up a sign that said over 100 million hamburgers served. Fifteen years later, they were up to a billion, and now they’ve simply stopped counting and just say billions and billions served. I suspect we will stop counting someday as to the numbers of records saved. Certainly if you look at the national network of archives—the records at the federal, state, local and academic levels—you would count well into the billions. Electronic records are only going to blow the top off.

Making it easy for researchers, students, and the general public to learn about and make use of the billions of items in our collection is clearly a challenge. Free and open access to the records of government will always be the work of this agency. Exhibits, classes, lectures, and digitization activities all contribute to our mission of encouraging the use of the records of government and exciting the next generation of historians to become a Michael Beschloss, or an Anne Firor Scott, or a T.J. Stiles or a Drew Faust, to choose a life of scholarship.

And to help everyday Americans better connect with their government. Let me share some stories with you about ordinary extraordinary moments in the Archives:

A man walked into a regional center with a letter dated May 1946, recommending his dad for the Bronze Star. The medal had never been awarded, and the son wondered this was an oversight or had the recommendation not been approved? Staff at the St. Louis Military Personnel Records Center made this case a priority and found additional documentation. Through our efforts, it was determined that he was entitled to the Bronze Star. Just two days after his 100th birthday, and 63 years after the recommendation was written, in a ceremony arranged by the National Archives regional office, local Army officials presented Walter Pierce with the Bronze Star.

Last February in Alaska, the granddaughter of an 88-year-old Anchorage resident visited to obtain a certified copy of his 1958 divorce decree. Prior to Alaska statehood in 1959, the Federal U.S. District Court handled divorce cases, so the file was in federal hands. We quickly found the final decree, and "made her day." Her grandfather in the nursing home was waiting for proof of his divorce . . . so he could remarry.

In New York, a patron contacted us looking for a relative who she and her entire family had believed perished in the Holocaust but apparently survived, although his wife and baby did not. Our records confirmed that he came to the U.S., remarried and named his new baby girl after the little girl who had died.

All over the country, archives are reuniting citizens with their rights and helping historians research and tell the American story. Through the work of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we’ve helped fund documentary histories of Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Martin Luther King, from the records of the Florida everglades to the civic history of Los Angeles.

Archives play such a vital role in our lives. President Franklin Roosevelt, in dedicating the FDR Library in Hyde Park, said it best:

"To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

Among democracies, I think through all the recorded history of the world, the building of permanent institutions like libraries and museums for the use of all the people flourishes. And that is especially true in our own land, because we believe that people ought to work out for themselves, and through their own study, the determination of their best interest rather than accept such so-called information as may be handed out to them by certain types of self-constituted leaders who decide what is best for them".

The Archives needs to continue to be above the fray, interested more in history, democracy, and the protection of both documents and individual rights. To that end, we are involved in several efforts to increase public access.

The Office of Government Information Services, which opened its doors just before I arrived, was established to act as the government’s Freedom of Information Act ombudsman by reviewing Freedom of Information Act activities government-wide and by helping to resolve disputes between requesters and agencies.

And, most recently, on December 29, President Obama established the National Declassification Center within the Archives. This is an inter-agency effort, led by the Archives, to streamline declassification processes, facilitate quality assurance, and provide training for declassification reviewers.

Ultimately, the Center will usher in a new day in the world of access, allowing us to make more records available for public scrutiny much more quickly. To give you a sense of the task ahead, there are now some 2,000 different security classification guides at work in the government and more than 400 million pages of records awaiting declassification and public access by December 31, 2013.

A couple of recent "memory losses" to illustrate the challenges associated with one form of Electronically Stored Information (ESI)—the new legal term of art under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, both relating to email.

The case against the Bush 43 White House was recently settled. CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) and the National Security Archive sued over 22 million missing e-mails representing 94 days of business. The suit and the work to recover the missing e-mails uncovered serious flaws in the e-mail archiving system in the Bush 43 first term. In fact, Microsoft was called in to help find electronic messages as early as October 2003, more than two years before the problem surfaced publicly.

More recently, a footnote in a Justice Department report released last month on the crafting of the torture memos disclosed that many of John Yoo’s e-mails has been destroyed. Those missing e-mails are Justice Department "records" and highlight the challenge of the National Archives in ensuring that each agency is creating electronic records capabilities which don’t allow this to happen.

Just last week the National Security Archive awarded its Rosemary Award (named after Rosemary Woods, President Nixon’s secretary) to the Federal Chief Information Officers Council, the senior federal officials responsible for $71 billion a year of IT purchases who have never addressed the failure of government to save its e-mail electronically. A 2008 survey by CREW, in fact, could not find a single federal agency policy that mandates an electronic record keeping system agency-wide, rather a "print and file" system is pervasive. A system that is highly selective and serves as a serious memory loss vehicle.

A bill passed in the House just last Wednesday, H.R. 1387, is entitled the Electronic Message Preservation Act, which gives the Archivist the authority to "promulgate regulations governing agency preservation of electronic messages that are records, regulations which will require the electronic capture, management, and preservation of electronic records."

Tomorrow I will be testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, Federal Services, and International Security in a hearing entitled "Removing the Shroud of Secrecy: Making Government More Transparent and Accountable." Testifying with me will be the White House Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, and Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra. While the theme is Open Government, I will be making several points:

The backbone of the Administration’s Open Government initiative is effective records management.

There is a disconnect between those responsible for agency records and the information technology folks in those same agencies.

The CIO Council, composed of the CIOs of all the agencies, need to work together to develop the IT tools necessary to manage electronic records in a cost effective way.

In addition, I will be sharing the preliminary results of a government-wide self assessment which my agency recently administered that illustrates how far short Federal agencies are in meeting their statutory responsibilities under the Federal Records Act and the E-Government Act of 2002, with particular attention paid to electronic records, especially email and web records. Almost 80 percent of the respondents (90 percent response rate to a mandatory assessment) self identified to being at a moderate to high level of risk.

All of this is tied into a single effort: the Open Government Initiative. In December 2009, the Obama Administration issued guidance to promote new lines of communication and cooperation between the Federal government and the American people through the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration. Four basic goals are part of the plan:

1. Publish Government Information Online — particularly high-value data and through an open gateway for agency activities.

2. Improve the Quality of Government Information

3. Create and Institutionalize a Culture of Open Government

4. Create an Enabling Policy Framework for Open Government

We are working through the mechanisms at the National Archives to embrace these goals and principles, and we will release a first draft of our plan on April 7. At the heart of the plan is a flagship initiative to develop web and data services that are worthy of the American people. This includes:

a redesigned archives.gov website that is simplified and inclusive of user communities

an easy, streamlined online public access experience that unlocks electronic and digitized records from sources across the agency

a strategic approach to digitization at NARA

social media tools leveraged to accomplish our goals within all sectors of the agency

an inventory of data sets

an updated FOIA Electronic Reading Room

an updated records management website that will be an example for records management throughout the federal government

I am excited about this, for I see openness as one of the more important ways the federal government can ensure the basic rights of citizens in a democracy. You can find out more about it on our website at www.archives.gov/open.

I am reminded of those rights every day. The Charters of Freedom—just around the corner from my office in the National Archives—are a bold reminder of the ideals of the nation, and the ideals of a national archives.

And I am reminded daily of what is at risk.

Are we losing our memory?

According to the Report of the Committee on the Records of Government, a bipartisan federal committee working with the scholars, "The United States is in danger of losing its memory." The federal government and state and local governments have huge quantities of paper records at risk. Historically valuable electronic records compound the problem. So says the Committee Report issued in 1985. Twenty-five years ago. Before the Web really took off. Before the rise of social media.

If the past teaches us anything, it is that challenges persist. A century ago, J. Franklin Jameson and the American Historical Association were crying out for the establishment of a National Archives, for we were losing our national memory. Fifty years ago, the Archivist of the United States was shaking his head in disbelief over the rampant expansion of federal record-making, putting our national memory at risk. Twenty-five years ago, we were in danger of losing it again. Now, I am here to say that the problem has finally gotten serious.

There are huge risks and challenges associated with what archives are doing. Particularly in the digital environment, where everything is saved yet little is preserved. Clearly we need to save better and preserve more (and not the other way around). The National Archives can play an important role in the evolution of the digital archives environment, with ERA as a cog around which much additional research and experimentation can grow, including R&D from the academic community. But we need the best minds at colleges and universities and the private sector working in concert to develop new ways of not simply saving the records, but preserving them and figuring out ways to make sure they are accessible. Without such judgment and collaboration, we are in danger of losing our memory, again.