"The Archivist of the United States Googled me . . . ."

Earlier today, National Public Radio's Weekend Edition program aired Liane Hansen's lengthy profile of David Ferreiro, the new Archivist of the United States, and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. It's a great piece, and it opens with news that Ferriero prepared for the interview by doing a little online research about Hansen and NPR and arranging to show Hansen records relating to her past work -- including a letter documenting President Eisenhower's opinions about Spam (the meat product nuisance, not the electronic communication nuisance).

Apart from a few minor errors (e.g., Hansen implies that "vault" items, most of which can be seen by researchers who document their need to see them and request access in advance, are completely off-limits to the public), Hansen avoids most of the journalistic clichés about archives. There's not a single reference to dust, and Hansen's description of the smell of a properly equipped and maintained repository -- "old paper and clean air" -- is elegantly simple and evocative.

Hansen's profile doesn't tackle the subject of electronic records, which Ferriero identified as one of his biggest concerns in a recent Federal Computer Week interview. However, it does emphasize one of his other top priorities: the digitization of NARA's non-electronic holdings. (Fortunately, it also stresses that digitizing each and every one of the 10 billion paper- and analog media-based items won't happen overnight.) It also stresses Ferriero's enduring passion for reference work, which will likely shape NARA's activities under his tenure.

My description of Hansen's profile is no substitute for actually listening to it. It's great publicity for Ferriero, NARA, and archives in general, and I wish that all media coverage relating to archives were this informative, entertaining, and perceptive.

Nixon tapes: "Has the New York Times lost it completely?"

I'm not exactly a dedicated follower of the Nixon tape recordings saga, so I'm not always attuned to its nuances or able to differentiate between significant new developments and scholarly kerfluffles that pop up on slow news days.

According to Stan Katz, who is a member of the writing team that posts on the Chronicle of Higher Education's Brainstorm blog, the story that appeared on the front page of yesterday's New York Times definitely falls into the latter category. In one of today's posts, Katz immediately makes plain his opinion of the article: "Has The New York Times lost it completely?" He then goes on to assert that the submission of an as-yet unpublished article to the American Historical Review is hardly newsworthy.

He's probably right about that. However, it's also apparent that he's not exactly a neutral observer:

So far as I can tell [from reading the article], someone named Peter Klingman (identified only as "an historian" -- but not an historian I have ever heard of before) has submitted an article to the American Historical Review alleging that (my friend) Stanley Kutler deliberately manipulated his published transcriptions of the Nixon tapes (in his 1997 Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes) so as to exonerate John Dean from complicity in the Watergate cover-up.

. . . . Kutler’s book was only an attempt to make some of the material quickly available in print for the use of the public. Despite Joan Hoff’s quoted statement that Abuse of Power is “used authoritatively,” Kutler has never claimed to have published the full and official record, and any trained historian would know that his book is not authoritative in that sense. His subject was Nixon’s complicity, not Dean’s, and there is no evidence that he consciously manipulated his transcriptions.

Katz may well be right about Kutler's intentions. However, as one of the people who commented on this post asserted, John Dean's subsequent career as a lecturer and television commentator roundly critical of the present-day Republican Party does make the level of his involvement in Watergate an ongoing matter of public interest.

Frankly, I'm not sure whether Stanley Kutler or Peter Klingman is closer to the truth, and for the time being, I'm going to assume that they are both people of integrity. I haven't had the chance to listen to the audio recordings posted on the Times site and compare them to the transcripts in Kutler's book, and I suspect that the debate will continue to rage on even after the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) releases the March 1973 tapes that are at the center of this controversy.

I'm going to keep an eye on this upheaval, but I probably won't comment further unless a) something incredibly important happens or b) subsequent developments highlight its archival ramifications.

PowerPoint to the People?

I don't expect that journalists will grasp the finer points of records management, and I recognize the acute time pressures that they face. I am nonetheless disappointed when a reporter or columnist whose work I generally admire makes a mess of things. Fred Kaplan, Slate's military affairs correspondent, has just joined the ranks of journalists who haven't done their homework.

In this week's column, "PowerPoint to the People," Kaplan starts by identifying another step that, in his view, would enable that the Obama administration could demonstrate its stated commitment to open government:

Force the federal agencies to file and maintain all the records they're creating now, so that in the future when citizens file [Freedom of Information Act] requests to declassify documents, they won't receive a form letter that reads, "Sorry, no such documents exist."

Archivists and records managers will immediately pinpoint the folly of this approach, which will result in the preservation of all kinds of materials that simply don't warrant long-term preservation, among them countless e-mail messages about routine matters (e.g., lost reading glasses, traffic problems, staff holiday parties), innumerable iterations of draft documents produced in the course of completing projects, duplicate copies of files disseminated for staff review or convenience, copies of billing records documenting routine purchases (e.g, pens, notepads), and other records of transitory value. In such a recordkeeping environment, the important stuff will probably be kept, but sifting through all of the digital detritus in order to find it might be a real challenge.

Most of "PowerPoint to the People" concerns a U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) assessment of recordkeeping practices within U.S. Air Force central offices. This report was completed in 2005 but remained an internal document until this week, when it was released as a result of a lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive.

Unfortunately, a close reading of the report itself suggests that Kaplan did not fully engage with it or do any sort of follow-up work. For example, as Kaplan rightly notes, the report indicates that "electronic records" generated by the fifteen units that comprise Headquarters Air Force "are generally not disposed of in accordance with" federal regulations. However, as the report plainly states, one of NARA's key findings was that "to date, this has largely resulted in retaining temprorary records indefinitely, as opposed to their premature disposal or the destruction of permanent documents" -- a conclusion that directly contradicts the keep-everything approach that Kaplan advocates.

Kaplan's dissection of the report's assessment of NARA's own capacity to manage electronic records also leaves the impression that this column was assembled with undue haste. He makes much of the report's assertion that NARA "is still unable to accept Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint slides": PowerPoint is the preferred format for internal Pentagon briefings, and NARA's inability to accept PowerPoint files raises the possibility that a significant amount of archival records created by the military "may be lost to the ether."

NARA's apparent inability to accept PowerPoint slides or Word documents is truly distressing, and NARA's current transfer guidelines indeed indicate that, at least at this point in time, agencies cannot transfer files in these formats. Nonetheless, had Kaplan done a few quick Web searches he would have been able to advance a stronger and more nuanced argument.

For example, Kaplan, whose only source is the 2005 Air Force recordkeeping report itself, points out that:

The National Archives only "recently" —- it doesn't say how recently -— revised its procedures so that it could accept e-mail with attachments, scanned text documents, PDFs, digital photos, and Web content.

According to NARA's current electronic records transfer guidelines, NARA began accepting e-mail with attachments in September 2002 and continued expanding its list of acceptable file formats until September 2004, when it started accepting Web records. Why Kaplan didn't do a quick Web search -- or simply call NARA's press office -- is a bit of a mystery.

Kaplan also notes that:

The National Archives is developing an "Electronic Records Archive," so that it can finally deal with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. But, according to the study, that is being "planned for implementation in the next seven years." (Italics added.) The study was written four years ago; so, assuming the program is still on track, it will be up and running three years from now, when Obama's first term is almost over.

NARA hasn't always been as forthcoming about the specifics of the multi-year, multi-phase Electronic Records Archives project, which began taking in records last summer, as some within the archival and records management communities would like. However, the NARA Web site contains a lot of information about the program, and tracking it down isn't particularly difficult.

Finally, Kaplan summarizes the report's recommendations regarding improvement of electronic records management practices as follows:

Meanwhile, the study urges all agencies to keep their electronic records in a safe place. Good luck with that.

In fairness, assessing the report's recommendations is a bit of a challenge: all of the higher-level recommendations have been redacted from the publicly released version of this report. However, the report contains many recommendations that were not redacted and are readily identifiable, among them:

• Give the records management office greater visibility and authority by increasing the salary grade of the records management officer and placing all records management staff positions under the authority of the records management officer.
• Develop detailed file plans for all Headquarters Air Force offices.
  
• Maintain all records "in electronic folders on a shared drive in accordance with the [records] disposition schedule."
• Headquarters Air Force should consider implementing an electronic recordkeeping system that complies with Department of Defense standard DOD 5015.2-STD.
• Transfer to NARA archival paper records and electronic records encoded in formats that NARA can currentl accept.
• Work with NARA to ensure that all electronic records are properly scheduled, i.e., classed as meriting permanent preservation or eligible for destruction at an agreed-upon time.
• Taking steps to ensure that duplicate copies of electronic records are identified and properly disposed of.
• Ensuring that records slated for transfer to a NARA-operated federal records center are indeed transferred appropriately.

One can argue that these recommendations fall short of the mark, but surely they amount to more than simply advising Headquarters Air Force to "keep their electronic records in a safe place."

I still like most of Kaplan's work; among other things, he's offered what is, in my view, the most cogent explanation to date of President Obama's decision to appoint Leon Panetta to head the Central Intelligence Agency. I also recognize that every now and then, a good columnist will produce a real clinker of a piece -- s/he may be chasing a big story, unable to marshal all the facts prior to deadline, or simply under the weather during a given week. I just wish that Kaplan's clinker had centered on something other than electronic recordkeeping.

"Futuristic computer system"?

According to the New York Times, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has "has put into effect an emergency plan to handle electronic records from the Bush White House." NARA had originally planned to transfer large quantities of digital images and e-mail messages into the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) on January 20.

Archives officials who disclosed the emergency plan said it would mean that the agency would initially take over parts of the White House storage system, freezing the contents on Jan. 20. Only later, after further study, will archivists try to move the records into the futuristic computer system they have devised as a repository for digital data.

Surely the article's authors could have come up with something better than "futuristic computer system," which leads one to suspect that they didn't do their homework.

Their subsequent use of quotation marks gives added weight to this suspicion:

The archives invoked its emergency plan to deal with problems in transferring two types of electronic files: a huge collection of digital photographs and the “records management system,” which provides an index to most of the textual records generated by Mr. Bush and his staff members in the last eight years.

I don't expect that reporters will acquire detailed knowledge of archival theory or the principles of records management, and blogging has made me increasingly appreciative of the time pressures and other limitations that they face. However, a little background information about the ERA project would have improved this article immeasurably and done a real service to the Times' readership.

The article is far better at highlighting the concerns of various government watchdog groups and explaining the challenges associated with assuming custody of an unprecedentedly large body of electronic records (NARA estimates it will receive 100 TB of data) and working with an administration that has not always managed its records properly and is not being particularly cooperative.

I'm hoping that as this saga continues, journalists start picking up on some of the basics of electronic records management and digital preservation. However, I'm not holding my breath . . . .