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Official Word: The Government Records Section Newsletter
The membership of the Government Records Section is made up of individual Society of American Archivists (SAA) members who are concerned with the administration, organization, and care of the records of government.
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Notes from the Chair… New Orleans City Archives Reopens Following Hurricane Katrina Preserving Georgia’s Historical Data DC 2006 – SAA Annual Conference NARA Building Electronic Records Archives (ERA) Texas: Estelle Schools Historic Site Project Portland, Oregon Electronic Archives Available on the Internet SSA-SAA Emergency Disaster Assistance Grant Fund Vermont Supreme Court Upholds Seal on Dean’s Documents Herkert Appointed Oregon State Archivist Ground Broken for NH State Archives Expansion Government Records Section: 2005 New Orleans Business Meeting NARA Partners with National Coalition for History Council of State Archivists Launches New Website From the Editor… Government Records Section Steering Committee
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NOTES FROM THE CHAIR… When our section met in New Orleans last August, none of us knew that within a week and a half much of the city would be under water, having suffered the ravages of Hurricane Katrina. The ensuing disaster wreaked havoc on one of the most distinctive cities in our country and destroyed or damaged valuable historical records all along the gulf coast. In the aftermath of this disaster, the Society of Southwest Archivists and the Society of American Archivists set up a disaster relief fund to help archives whose records were affected by Katrina (and, later, by Hurricane Rita). This newsletter includes further information on this fund, but let me stress that the money for this fund is coming from archivists and archival associations across the country. So if you are able to assist your colleagues by supporting the fund, please visit http://www.archivists.org/katrina/contribute.asp to make your donation. Or send your contribution by fax (using a credit card) to 312-347-1452 or via mail to: Society of American Archivists, Attn: SSA-SAA EDA Grant Fund, 527 South Wells Street, Fifth Floor, Chicago, IL 60607. In related news, just before I left New Orleans myself I made a visit to the New Orleans Public Library to conduct a little research. While there, I ran into Government Records Section member, Wayne Everard, who volunteered to be the section’s webmaster. I accepted his offer on the spot. In the days that followed, during which the New Orleans Public Library suffered mightily and while communications into and out of New Orleans were severely hampered, Wayne found a way to let me know that he was all right and that he intended to keep his commitment to being our webmaster. My thanks to Wayne for going far beyond the call of duty to help our section. In other section news, Lucy Barber, who has been a state representative from the California State Archives, starts a new job at the middle of January 2006. She has accepted the position of Director of Technology Initiatives for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), replacing Mike Meier who is retiring. Lucy, of course, will remain an officer of the Government Records Section, but she’ll be a federal (instead of a state) representative for the remainder of her term. Our congratulations to Lucy on her new job. And, as a native Californian who now lives on the east coast, I welcome her to the other side of the country. Related to the issue of GRS representatives is a plan we have to revamp our section by-laws. The process of voting in members who represent a certain government constituency (federal, state, and local) is not always flexible enough for the section to hold an election that both meets our needs and foresees openings on our slate of officers. So I’m asking for volunteers to review our by-laws in general and part of our election procedures in particular to see if we can envision some possible improvements to this document. If you are interested in serving, drop me an email at ghuth@mail.nysed.gov or give me a call at 518/402-5371. The section will vote on any proposed amendments at our next section meeting this summer. I wish everyone a happy and productive new year. See all of you in Washington, DC, seven months from now.
Geof Huth, GRS Chair
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NEW ORLEANS CITY ARCHIVES REOPENS FOLLOWING HURRICANE KATRINA The New Orleans City Archives reopened to the public on November 29 after being closed for three months following Hurricane Katrina. Archivists Wayne Everard and Irene Wainwright will provide access to the collection on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. They are among the nineteen New Orleans Public Library staff members who survived the massive layoff of city workers in mid-October. That layoff was necessitated by the fact that the city’s tax base was effectively wiped out by the Katrina disaster. It is unclear at this time when NOPL and the City Archives will be able to return to anything approaching pre-storm operating levels. The City Archives is part of NOPL’s Louisiana Division, housed in the Main Library in downtown New Orleans. The collection comprises municipal records (1769-date) along with civil (1804-1926) and criminal (1830-1931) court records from Orleans Parish. Katrina spared the records despite the fact that most of them are stored in the building’s sub-basement some eighteen feet below sea level. Just about every other building in the vicinity did flood, but the Library somehow managed to stay dry. Several record series housed off site, though, were damaged when the roof of the warehouse facility blew away in the storm. The damaged materials were recovered by Munters and should be back in New Orleans by the time these words are published. In addition to the City Archives, the Louisiana Division also houses the NOPL Special Collections. Included under that umbrella is the Louisiana Photograph Collection (1860s-2002), the Louisiana Map Collection (1763-1997), the Carnival Collection (1860s-2004), the Manuscript Collection (1801-2000), and a number of collections of ephemera. None of the Special Collections were damaged by Katrina, nor were any of the general materials in the Division (books, periodicals, microforms, city and state documents, vertical files, and the NOPL genealogy collection). Although NOPL’s Main Library was spared, eight of the system's thirteen facilities suffered severe flood damage and will be closed indefinitely. Only Main and two of NOPL’s smaller branches are currently operating—and they are providing only limited services during shortened hours. The New Orleans City Archives, the New Orleans Public Library, and the entire City of New Orleans are on a long, slow, difficult path to recovery. We need the help of our government and the help of our friends. For more information on the New Orleans Public Library and the City Archives and their recovery, please visit the Library’s web site at http://nutrias.org.
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PRESERVING GEORGIA’S HISTORICAL DATA In the past year, the Georgia Archives has successfully completed an NHPRC grant, Privacy and Access Issues in Georgia E-Government, which involved studying the issues surrounding personal information, confidentiality, and access to government records in Georgia. Through a series of presentations and open discussions, state and local government administrators considered the issues involved in providing access to government records while protecting the privacy of individual citizens—represented by the Classification step of the lifecycle workflow. The final component of the grant was the funding of a demonstration project illustrating how eXtensible Markup Language (XML) could be used to protect confidential data while providing necessary access to public records. The Georgia Technology Authority agreed to match the funding provided by the Georgia Archives for this project. The demonstration project selected was the Executive Clemency Online Application and Verification System (ECOAVS) being implemented by the Board of Pardons and Paroles. The case study for this project can be found on the Records & Information Management Services (RIMS) web page at http://www.GeorgiaArchives.org. Following up on the successful completion of this project, the Georgia Archives and the Board of Pardons and Paroles began a collaborative project in January (funded by the NHPRC) to implement a complete lifecycle management process within the parole records that will enable the transfer of the permanent clemency record to the Archives. This project will allow the Georgia Archives to test methods of secure transfer for digital records as well as develop needed policies and procedures for their preservation. The project web site for this grant can also be found at www.GeorgiaArchives.org. Currently, the site contains a copy of the original grant application, narrative progress reports, policies for the establishment and functioning of the Digital Archives, metadata standards, and procedures for transfer of electronic records via CD. Case studies on the implementation of a records management application at the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and the appraisal of electronic parole/pardon records will also be placed on the project web page along with presentations about project status. This project will serve as the implementation model of the lifecycle management process in the state of Georgia and provide the Georgia Archives with a business case for the construction of a digital archives for government records. From the marble hills of northern Georgia to the turpentine country in the southeastern part of the state, Georgia’s Circuit Rider Archivist visited 36 local governments and historical societies between August 1 and Thanksgiving 2005. The Circuit Rider Archivist Program was established through an NHPRC grant awarded to the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board and in cooperation with the Georgia Archives and Clayton State University. Dr. Randall S. Gooden has filled the role of the traveling archivist to bring on-site advice and support on issues of institutional advocacy, fundraising, inventorying, policy-development, arrangement and description, and preservation. A number of visits to county and city governments supported rejuvenation of records management as outlined under Georgia law. Special emphasis is being placed on disaster preparedness using planning materials provided by the Georgia Archives. In addition to instruction and encouragement, Gooden is making organizations aware of opportunities for Historic Records Project Grants from the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board and guiding the governments and historical repositories in preparing eligible grant projects. The Circuit Rider Archivist will complete a total of 57 visits by February 1, 2006. This will allow him to provide grant information to each of his scheduled stops before the grant application deadline of March 1, 2006. Besides the Circuit Rider Archivist work, the NHPRC grant project includes a feasibility study regarding the development of a graduate program in archival studies at Clayton State University, adjacent to the Georgia archives.
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DC 2006 – SAA ANNUAL CONFERENCE The Program Committee for the 2006 joint annual meeting of CoSA, NAGARA, and SAA has been working diligently to choose the session proposals that will make up the meeting program. The 2006 Conference will be held July 31 – August 6 at the Hilton Washington and Towers. In early November, the committee members received 143 proposals and reviewed and ranked them. The committee then met from December 2nd through the 4th to discuss and finalize the program selection. The work was difficult – there were twice as many proposals as there were time slots to fill. For the most part this is great news. It means that participation is high and that the proposals selected will offer fabulous opportunities for all attendees. But is also means that excellent proposals will be left off the program. In addition to Bob Horton, co-chair of the committee, other government archivists in attendance during the December sessions review meeting were Barbara Teague, Terry Baxter, Peggy Adams, Jerry Handfield, Candace Loewen (Canada) and Vicki Walch. Brenda Banks was unable to attend the meeting, but sent written input. There were slots for 72 program sessions. The committee decided to expand to 80 sessions, since there was another meeting room available with no extra cost. This ensured that even more session choices would be available for this large meeting. The SAA meeting planners think that the attendance at this meeting may approach 2500, based on SAA's meeting attendance trend and the fact that this is a joint meeting located in a popular travel venue that is also home to many archivists. At an early rough count there appears to be 34 of the accepted 80 sessions that either had a government archivist on the program, or had a government archives focus. During the scheduling of these sessions on the program, Vicki worked with Bob and Tom Hyry (co-chair) to make sure that the state archivists on the program did not conflict with any sessions that they might need to attend for CoSA. Nancy Beaumont also requested that program planners pay attention to any particular conflicts that government archivists might have with concurrent sessions, in case some sessions needed to be switched around. With a program this large, however, that kind of conflict is inevitable. The main session days (Thursday, Friday, and Saturday) will start off strong with a joint plenary session focusing on a high-interest topic. The president of the three organizations will each lead one of the hour-long plenaries that may include both remarks by the president as well as a prominent outside speaker. The Thursday plenary will focus on Technology, led by SAA's Richard Pearce-Moses. On Friday, CoSA's David Carmichael will lead one on Advocacy and Public Awareness. Saturday’s plenary on Disaster Planning and Preparedness will be led by NAGARA's Tim Slavin. The program will include sessions of interest only to government archivists. There are numerous sessions with speakers from government, special collections, universities, and other repositories who plan to all speak on a common subject or theme. The NAGARA Board of Directors has recommended scheduling its Local Government Records Roundtable as a joint meeting with SAA’s Local Government Records Roundtable. Program Committee members will be notifying both successful and unsuccessful program proposers in December and early January. The preliminary program will be sent to the printer in late February. John LeGloahec, from the International Monetary Fund Archives (jlegloahec@imf.org) and Jennifer Davis McDaid, from The Library of Virginia (jmcdaid@lva.lib.va.us) serve as co-chairs for the 2006 Host Committee. Off-program activities will include tours of local repositories, special events, exhibits, and networking opportunities. For more on this exciting conference, visit the Web sites for the Society of American Archivists (http://www.archivists.org), NAGARA (http://www.nagara.org), and CoSA (http://www.statearchivists.org).
Summarized from reports submitted by Barbara Teague, Terry Baxter and Jennifer Davis McDaid.
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NARA BUILDING ELECTRONIC RECORDS ARCHIVES (ERA) In its National Archives Building in Washington and its facilities around the country, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) preserves the parchments with which the nation was founded and the tens of billions of pieces of paper that document its history. Now, NARA has taken on the new challenge of preserving the electronic records of today’s and tomorrow’s government: text documents, e-mails, digital images, videotape, maps, charts, web pages, drawings, and data bases. To do this, NARA is building an Electronic Records Archives (ERA) to preserve and make accessible, far into the future, the electronic records being created by the Federal Government today and in the future. See: http://www.archives.gov/era. The ERA, which will have initial operating capability in 2007, will allow anyone—at any time, from anywhere—to access these electronic documents, regardless of the hardware and software with which they were created or that is in use in the future. In September 2005, NARA awarded a $308 million contract to Lockheed Martin Corporation for the design and construction of the ERA. Lockheed won the contract after a multi-year competition with some of the nation’s leading information technology companies. The awarding of the contract to Lockheed came after several years of research by NARA in partnership with other Federal agencies, state governments, major research universities, nonprofit organizations, foreign governments, and private businesses. Among them were the Supercomputer Center at the University of California at San Diego; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois; the Georgia Tech Research Institute; and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. NARA has also worked with other Federal agencies, such as the Army Research Laboratory and the National Institute for Standards and Technology, as well as industry groups and international organizations that face similar recordkeeping challenges. “We have come to a major milestone in the quest to meet the challenge posed by electronic records,” Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein told the Association of Research Libraries recently. Source: http://www.archives.gov/about/speeches/2005/10-27-05.html. “There has been a race against technology as we watch software become obsolete almost as soon as it is installed in our computers,” Weinstein said. “But the technology for preserving electronic records is finally catching up with the technology for creating them.” Weinstein noted that the ERA contract announcement comes “in a climate of urgency” when “an unprecedented number” of electronic records is being created by the Federal Government, the most important of which will be preserved and made accessible at NARA indefinitely. Without an ERA, Weinstein said, “we could face a tomorrow without a yesterday.” Lost or difficult to access, he said, could be records of the current Presidency; national security documents, such as weapons designs and intelligence information; and personal information that veterans, senior citizens and others need to prove their eligibility for promised Government benefits in their retirement or in time of need. To help NARA guide the development of the ERA, Weinstein recently appointed an Advisory Committee on the Electronic Records Archives. It is made up of experts on computer science, information technology, archival science, records management, information science, law, history, genealogy, and education. Source: http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2006/nr06-19.html. The committee, which met for the first time on November 30, is chaired by Dr. Robert Kahn, chairman, CEO, and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. Kahn recently received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for designing the software code that is used to transmit data over the Internet. “As we move forward to making the Electronic Records Archives a reality,” said Kenneth Thibodeau, director of the ERA Program at NARA, “it is more important than ever that we reach out to obtain advice from a broad spectrum of relevant expertise and interests.” Work on the ERA will have a far-reaching impact all across the Federal Government and into the private sector. The ERA is driving the development of the new technologies that will enable Federal departments and agencies, which must keep active electronic records for many years, to keep and use those records while taking advantage of advances in information technology. Outside the Federal Government, the technology that ERA will provide can be scaled and adapted for archives and libraries in businesses and corporations, colleges and universities, state and local governments, and hospitals and medical facilities. The search for a solution to preserve the Federal Government’s electronic records began more than seven years ago. In 1998, NARA invested seed money to engage Government and private research partners to determine if preservation of electronic records was possible. This research created new techniques that led to the first proof-of-concept in 1999 and demonstrated that electronic records preservation was a possibility. NARA then turned its attention to building a system that had never been created before and that was still subject to computer science research. Initial steps included the creation of an ERA Program Management Office and the development of ERA system requirements, with critical input from Federal, state, and local governments, professional organizations, scientific communities, and private sector stakeholders. The $308 million contract award to Lockheed in September 2005 covers all contract costs for development, acquisition of hardware and software products, integration, deployment, and operational support through 2012. As the prime contractor for the ERA project, Lockheed Martin said it would lead a team of companies with archiving and data management expertise. The team includes BearingPoint Inc., McLean VA; Fenestra Technologies Corp., Germantown, MD; FileTek Inc., Rockville, MD; History Associates Inc., Rockville, MD; EDS Corp., Plano, TX; Image Fortress Corp., Westford, MA; Métier Ltd., Washington, DC; Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), San Diego, CA; and Tessella Inc., Newton, MA.
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Official Word: The Government Records Section Newsletter
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