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Sender:	Records Management Program <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:	No Mention of Records Managers or NARA!
From:	"Skillman, Juanita" <[log in to unmask]>
Date:	Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:47:47 -0700
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Reply-To:	Records Management Program <[log in to unmask]>
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In Digital Age, Federal Files Blip Into Oblivion

New York Times (09/13/08) P. A1 ; Pear, Robert

Federal employees struggling to cope with the explosion of electronic records are neglecting to regularly save the documents they produce in digital form, and many federal records are slipping through the cracks as a result. Exacerbating the situation is uncertainty over what documents are deemed worthy of preservation, and historians, archivists, librarians, congressional investigators, and watchdog organizations are especially concerned about how these problems will impact attempts to trace the decision-making process and assign accountability to federal officials. "My biggest worry is that even with the best and brightest minds working on this problem, the risks are so great that we may lose significant portions of our history," says Richard Pearce-Moses, former president of the Society of American Archivists. The federal government's digital bookkeeping challenge becomes more complicated every month as employees generate billions of email messages, and the decentralization of record keeping and the reduction of federal clerical employees is adding to the difficulty. Experts fear that digitally preserved items may not be readily accessible in the future because the equipment and software needed to read them will become relics. "At the most basic level, many agency employees do not even understand what a federal record is, much less how it must be preserved," laments Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. Companies that failed to provide electronic records sought in litigation have been slapped with severe penalties, and similar penalties can be imposed on the federal government for such failures.

Source: New York Times*
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/13records.html

* Source requires login to website.

[cid:image001.gif@01C91CA9.084F5F40]
Juanita Skillman, CRM
OCSD Records Management
714.593.7129
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>

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