We’re basically in a limestone cave carved out of the bluff, about a half-a-mile into
the limestone quarry. I’m Kim Gentile, assistant director of civilian personnel records for
the National Personnel Records Center, which is part of the National Archives. We’re
in Valmeyer, Illinois, in our annex facility. The National Archives can take on any size
scanning project. By working with another federal agency, no procurement action necessary.
Once the boxes come in, we track the boxes by wanding them in as “received.” We check
the manifest to make sure that there’s no discrepancies in anything. We print out a
bar code for each file. By allowing the National Archives to digitize an agency’s records,
the agency does not have to invest in the equipment and the manpower to make that digitization
happen. I’m preparing the folder for scanning. I take staples out because these can’t go
through a scanner. I make sure that there’s no dog ears. For example, like this one covers
up the text, so I fix that. Our files that we work with contain a large amount of private
information. Social Security numbers, names, dates of birth, addresses. By having federal
employees work with these records we go through security checks and as federal employees we
are sworn to protect that information. Every so many images you would like to stop and
just check to make sure that your images came through correctly. We check every image. I’m
the first step of quality control. The computer automatically rejects images that it feels
aren’t clear. If it’s speckly or if the image is hard to read we can change the settings
and make it more clear. And then there’s a second step of quality control. I’m checking
all the documents in the folder to make sure that there’s a clean document, crisp, legible
document for the customer to read. Working with the Federal Records Centers was a pleasure.
I’m John Dalen, fish biologist. I work for the US Army Corps of Engineers. Bonneville
Dam’s been running their fish ladders and counting their fish since 1938. I’ve got
literally hundreds of people, the public, researchers who need the fish counts. So we
asked the Federal Records Centers to make electronic copies of them so that we could
put ‘em on our website. We do index each document and we’re able then to identify
forms, effective dates and other index fields that can allow our customers to use these
records most efficiently. This is the last step, we’re getting ready to create a CD.
We provide the customer with their own personal CD. One of the benefits to having the National
Archives scan your documents is that once we have finished they don’t have to leave
federal agency custody. They can go directly into storage. We store our records in National
Archives-approved space and we’re able to support our agency needs through the lifecycle
of those records. Within a couple of weeks they had the job done. And the price was really
good! We are one National Archives that can support the beginning to the end of your record
life.