One of the less well known by-products of the ERA project has been our involvement in
research on tools for managing and reading electronic records. We do not have a research
and development budget; however, from the beginning we have used funding from the ERA
account and invested those monies in coordinated research with leading research agencies through
the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program.
This has led to collaboration with some of the most innovative research being conducted
at places like the Army Research Laboratory in Maryland, the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications at the University of Illinois, and more recently the School of Information
and Library Science at the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing
Institute, which draws on the talents of seven universities and institutions in North Carolina
including Duke, UNC, and NC State. SAA recognized the excellence of the DICE
group at UNC in 2008 with the presentation of the J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy
Award. Without the involvement of the National Archives, federal information technology research
would not be focusing on tools that are useful to archivists.
Last year, we formalized our research activities by creating a new unit called the National
Archives Center for Advanced Systems and Technologies or "NCAST". Ken Thibodeau is directing that
group, and they will focus on how to move cutting edge research in computer technology
applied linguistics into tools that can be used by Archivists.
Some of those tools are available for you to use today. The National Archives of Great
Britain developed DROIDS, software that will tell you what software created a particular
file. NCAST and the Army Research Center are developing novel methods, which today identify
over 70 file types, not recognized by DROIDS. These results and developments will ultimately
be incorporated into DROIDS. DROIDS, however, just shows us how to unlock
the box. It doesn’t tell us anything about what is inside the box. In a separate project
with Georgia Tech, we are developing software that will identify what type of record we
have opened. Is it a letter, or a memo? Is this a document associated with a nomination,
or is it a commendation? This is the first step towards an intelligent system that can
look into those 200 million emails and weed out the lunch dates and give us the ones that
deal with policy.
Last month, the National Archives delivered to the Senate over 170,000 pages of records
from the Clinton Library for the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings. We did this in record
time, but we did it with brute force —16 archivists, 6 archival technicians, and a
supervisory archivist put in over 6,000 hours on the job — working every Saturday, Sunday,
and Memorial Day. I hope that some of these tools will be ready for the next nomination.
Another tool available to you today is iRODS, which stands for "Integrated Rule-Oriented
Data System". iRODS is another example of how our research collaboration is serving
the broader archival community. This year, at the iRODS User’s Group Meeting, a group
of researchers presented initial results from the Distributed Custodial Archival Preservation
Environments (DCAPE) a project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records
Commission. DCAPE develops a framework to support institution-specific preservation
policies while providing the economy of scale needed for cost-effective services. DCAPE
relies on iRODS to implement those institution-specific rules.
Electronic records are just one of the challenges facing the National Archives. When I arrived
last winter, I found an agency in need of a culture change to be able to exist and thrive
in the digital age. The National Archives needs to be more nimble. It needs to take
risks in trying new approaches to recordkeeping. And it needs to make smarter and more creative
use of technology.