Priorities in Government Record-Keeping for the Digital Era

Government agencies are now be required to go all in on digital recordkeeping. Office of Management and Budget memo M-23-07 states that the government’s recordkeeper, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), is no longer accepting permanent or temporary analog records. The memo’s rule went into effect in June.

NARA CIO Sheena Burrell stands at the forefront of this endeavor to digitize archives and records dating from centuries ago through today. In a conversation with GovCIO Media & Research, Burrell shared her perspective on the evolving requirements of electronic records, her vision for technology and the challenges inherent in safeguarding digital legacies.

What has the tech journey around federal record-keeping and digitization been like for some agencies?

Burrell: Government’s deadline to accept only electronic records just came up. I met with Environmental Protection Agency CIO Vaughn Noga who shared how its digitization center in Edison, New Jersey, is utilizing AI and natural language processing to create record schedules as the agency digitizes its records.

We’ve also worked with the Census Bureau and have done a cloud-to-cloud transfer of their records. We did this for our 1950 census records. Now those records are online and available to the public.

There are a few challenges agencies are experiencing in this journey. Although we’re four years past the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns during that time slowed down the ability for agencies to digitize their records. There weren’t people physically in the building who could take a paper record and scan it in.

Another challenge is enabling search for these records via optical character recognition so that anybody can search within those records digitally.

We have to be able to provide our customers with a reliable, safe place to store documents and retrieve them in a way that is easy, fast and reliable. Our end users span a gamut of people, it could be educators, it could be researchers, could be the day-to-day public person just trying to look for something on our National Archives catalog.

What are some of your tech and modernization focuses over the coming year?

Burrell: A lot of my goals as CIO is to be able to secure our networks and securely provide information to the public, to ensure that what I’m doing is meeting the public where they are and consider our customer experience, how we engage with our customers in a way that makes the most sense for them.

We have a GovCloud environment, which does have additional security controls and layers. We have worked with our CISO organization and we work closely together to ensure we have the right security infrastructure in place.

I want to look at innovative ideas that could improve our search capability, since the underlying resources that help with these search functions are the metadata, as well as optical character recognition (OCR).

We are piloting a couple different AI initiatives for semantic search. Google, for instance, “George Washington” and you may get more information about the different wars that George Washington had to fight in, you may get results for George Washington University, etc. The AI has to have some understanding of the context in which you’re searching for.

Even within NARA, we’re looking at AI to help us and training AI models for our own records retention and policies. We have other AI initiatives and pilots assisting with FOIA cases, reviewing and redacting information before sending it out.

What does NARA’s own responsibility for the OMB mandate entail?

Burrell: A lot of people have been contacting us and saying, “I have these records. How do I give them to you?” Our role is really to provide that guidance.

We also have to digitize our own records. There are certain requirements for digitizing documents and the standards of digitizing those documents, but those requirements don’t come from the CIO organization. Those requirements came from NARA Chief Records Officer Laurence Brewer, so even NARA has to be able to comply with its own standards.

NARA creates the rules and gives out the mandates, along with OMB. We also are the recipients of these electronic records. We have to help the agencies as they transfer those records. We also have to store those records.

What do you look forward to over the coming year?

Burrell: I am looking forward to innovation. I think there’s a great space here from a records management standpoint for AI. I look forward to providing a better customer experience and more reliable search features especially as we get more proficient with artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. This could be impactful for people looking through their genealogy records, for example.