Search for tomorrow: The electronic records research program of the u.s. national historical publications and records commission

Journal of Government Information

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 367-373

  Ray, Joyce M ^a  

^a Discretionary Programs Div   (United States)

Author keywords

Archives and records management; National Archives and Records Administration; National Historical Publications and Records Commission; Preservation of electronic records; Research grants for electronic record keeping

Indexed keywords

EID: 0040116707     PISSN: 13520237     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/S1352-0237(98)00016-1     Document Type: Article

References (5)

1. Commission on Preservation and Access and the Research Libraries Group, Preserving Digital Information, Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information, (Washington, DC: Commission on Preservation and Access, 1996). Available on the Web site of the Research Libraries Group at 〈 http://www.rlg.org , or in print from the Council on Library and Information Resources, Commission on Preservation and Access.
2. U.S. National Historical Publications and Records Commission, Research Issues in Electronic Records: A Report of the Working Meeting, (Minnesota Historical Society, 1991). Available on the NHPRC Web site at 〈 http://www.nara.gov/nara/nhprc/ , or in print from the NHPRC.
3. The U.S. Department of Defense is developing a standard test suite that will be used by the Defense Information Systems Agency Joint Interoperability Test Command to test and evaluate commercial off-the-shelf software products capable of managing electronic records. Those products that pass the standard certification test will be placed on a formal Records Management Product Register. Information about the testing program is available at 〈 http://www.dtic.mil:80/c3i/recmgmt.html .
4. States that have received electronic records program development or consulting grants from the NHPRC are Alaska, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Vermont.
5. Storage costs have declined rapidly in the last several years. The estimated cost of storing 1 Terabyte of information (the equivalent of approximately 2,000 file cabinets) offline on magnetic disk has fallen from $1,000,000 in 1994 to $64,000 in 1997. [Source: "20 Year Price List from 3 Day UCLA Extension Document Imaging Course," posted on Electronic Records Listserv, ERECS-L@CNSIBM.ALBANY.EDU., September 3, 1997.] Note, however, that costs for maintaining information online or near-line are considerably higher than offline storage and include the cost of migrating information as obsolete systems are replaced and the cost of identifying and retrieving information, which rises proportionately with file size. Reliable estimates of long-term migration and retrieval costs for current information are not yet available.