With agencies managing a growing mass of data, the National Archives and Records Management is examining how to do digital records management without human intervention.

NARA just successfully shepherded agencies to a longstanding deadline for when the Archives would no longer accept paper and other analog records. The deadline drove many agencies to digitize their analog records and ditch paper-based processes.

But now agencies are confronting how to meet their records management obligations amid an ever-expanding deluge of emails, chat messages, text files and other digital records.

“The scale of federal information keeps growing exponentially,” Lisa Haralampus, director of federal records management policy and outreach, said in a recent interview. “We’re not going to save everything everywhere. So, how are we going to figure out what we want to manage going forward? We are looking for solutions that are practical, that depend on the type of records that are being created.”

Haralampus pointed to email as an example. Under  NARA’s “Capstone” policy, agencies can automatically archive the emails of senior officials permanently. They can also save the emails of lower level employees on a temporary basis.

Even as NARA considers expanding the Capstone policy to other types of digital records, though, Haralampus acknowledged email retention is a complex records management issue.

“Figuring that out is something that we’re still working on today, because it’s easy to collect the email and hold it,” she said. “It’s much harder to determine, is it the appropriate time to delete it? For example, has the agency received a lawsuit or a potential lawsuit they know was coming? … So, there are a lot of factors that go into making sure it’s time to delete records.”

‘Zero click’ records management

Megan O’Hern, director of archives and information services at professional services firm HAI, said agencies previously faced the challenge of regularly sorting through boxes of paper to ensure they complied with NARA’s record schedules.

But now, O’Hern said agencies are confronting the digital version of that challenge as federal employees create, save, share and otherwise manage their work on computers and phones.

“It’s still really hard to sort through all of that and figure out what’s temporary and what’s permanent and send it to the right channels,” O’Hern said. “And you have to do that regularly. Otherwise, you end up with the equivalent of the record room of 300 boxes, just in a digital format.”

In many cases, NARA wants to remove the burden of digital records management from rank-and-file employees by turning to automation and other technologies. Haralampus said NARA also wants to build a cadre of information management professionals who can manage digital records policies and processes behind the scenes.

“We are calling this strategy ‘zero click’ so it’s zero click for users,” Haralampus said. “And I like to say, it’s 10,000 clicks for the information professionals behind the scene. So, we can get there. I think we’re going to have a modern records management environment where we’re actually systemically and at scale able to manage the records created by agencies.”

Agencies explore ‘cognitive’ technology

Agencies are also exploring how technologies can help them with records management. O’Hern pointed to how NARA’s 2022 annual report on records management, which says 37% of agencies were using or planned to use “cognitive technologies” to manage their records. Agencies told NARA those technologies include artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation and e-discovery tools.

“That’s a really promising tool to help agencies do this, if it can be implemented well,” O’Hern said.

Meanwhile, NARA is also helping create shared services for digital records management.

Haralampus said NARA works with General Services Administration to ensure certified records management tools are available for agencies as they purchase digital services.

NARA is also examining how AI and machine learning is impacting federal records management.

“How can we as records managers leverage AI?” Haralampus said. “Are there ways we could train systems to look at vast volumes of data and information and records and answer the question, how long should these be kept? Is anything in this collection historically valuable? Can we do that as records managers? That is a dream, it is a way off, but it’s potentially something we could realize. And then the other way that NARA needs to help support digital records management is by looking at … the use cases which the government is putting forward for AI, and does that have any records management implications?”

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