NARA aims to expand its email records strategy with texts and other messages.

 

In an effort to assist agencies dealing with an ever-growing flood of electronic records, the National Archives and Records Administration is looking to extend a successful approach for managing email records to text messages and other digital communications.

After COVID-19 required agencies to operate more remotely and broadly use video meetings, chat messaging applications, and other digital means to do official government business, the problem has only grown more widespread.

During an event organised by the Digital Government Institute in Washington on August 23, Laurence Brewer, the U.S. chief records officer at NARA, said: "The virtual world has influenced electronic records management." "As new mechanisms that enable agencies to communicate and collaborate electronically continue to be developed, I think we're still learning what the consequences are,"

According to Brewer, NARA is concentrating on providing agencies with guidance to assist with the implementation of methods of managing digital records that range from social media to text messages and collaboration platforms, including by extending the "Capstone" guidance for email to other forms of digital communications.

Brewer stated, "We want to broaden Capstone beyond what it presently provides for email to include text, chat, and instant communications."

The Capstone approach, which was published in 2013, offered agencies instructions for managing email records electronically. It arrived ahead of the 2016 deadline for agencies to manage all permanent and temporary email records in an electronic format.

The guidance provided a methodical method for storing email data rather than doing so on a case-by-case basis, allowing agencies to designate high officials' email accounts as permanent and other federal employee accounts as temporary.

According to Jason Baron, a professor at the University of Maryland's iSchool and the former director of litigation at NARA, Capstone gave agencies a way to automatically archive and preserve emails rather than leaving it to individual users and agency offices to make sure they are in compliance with federal records retention laws.

According to him, the goal of Capstone is to guarantee that the documents of senior government officials are properly maintained and archived to assure accountability and public access for a very long time.

In an interview, Baron stated that "tens of millions of emails are currently housed in agency repositories that are subject to [the Freedom of Information Act] and that will be permanently archived in the National Archives." "This is a significant milestone for email preservation, and NARA will now go much further when discussing messaging preservation as part of Capstone."

According to Baron, agency officials who conduct business via text messaging and other digital interactions desperately require Capstone's automation feature. Although these messages must be preserved in accordance with federal records laws, he said, it's frequently up to the individual to take screenshots or find other methods of archiving their messages.

According to Baron, "Agencies have not supplied the capability to automatically gather from phones and from other devices, texts and ephemeral app messages that relate to government business." "The person who has to do it shouldn't be doing it. The organisation should be in charge of making sure all of these communications are delivered correctly.

According to Brewer and Baron, NARA contemplated including all types of electronic records in the advice when Capstone was first being written, not just email. However, Brewer asserts that at the time, the ability to automatically preserve texts and other digital communications was not as advanced as it is now.

Since the information of the Secret Service's lost texts from January 6 became public, the preservation of government text messages has gained increased relevance. According to a NARA white paper, agencies frequently neglected or destroyed crucial email data, which led to the adoption of the Capstone strategy.

We concentrated on email when [Capstone] originally launched, according to Brewer. We thought about it, but at the time, the technology wasn't quite there to enable that type of a guidance approach. "Now, it's all over the news with a certain agency I won't name concerning SMS messages."

Enterprise capabilities for automatically capturing messages are now available in many messaging applications. Baron declared, "Star Wars is not it."

However, not every programme has those functions, so agencies must learn about the messaging services their employees use and perhaps establish some guidelines.

Each organisation should examine the available commercial space, according to Baron, who also advised selecting one or more apps and finding out how to archive texts.

According to Brewer, NARA is also developing technological solutions as part of the Federal Electronic Records Modernization Initiative (FERMI) to provide agency records managers with tools and services for text message retention as well as other types of electronic record preservation.

He stated, "We're looking at how we use AI, and we want to provide advice that will help agencies get there." But in order for agencies to effectively execute guidelines, we also need to be aware of the technology and tools that are available to them.