Federal agencies sought to transfer nearly 1 million cubic feet of records to the National Archives and federal records centers ahead of a landmark electronic records deadline.

On July 1, the National Archives and Records Administration stopped accepting transfer requests for analog records, including paper. Going forward, agencies will only be able to transfer electronic records, with some limited exceptions.

The passing of the June 30 deadline marks a key moment in the federal government’s shift to digital processes.

“The deadline has been the focus for so many agency federal records management programs, it’s sometimes hard to believe we’ve made it to the other side,” Lisa Haralampus, director of records management policy and outreach at NARA, said in an interview with Federal News Network.

The impending deadline sparked a surge of transfer requests, as agencies sought to shed paper and analog records.

Over the past year, Haralampus said agencies made more than 1,000 direct offers to the Archives, representing approximately 65,000 cubic feet of records. Direct offers are permanent records considered to be historically valuable. They’re directly “accessioned” into the Archives. “Not many records” clear that threshold, Haralampus said, and the amount of direct offers made ahead of the June 30 deadline is “a higher number than normal.”

Meanwhile, agencies also submitted a collective 40,000 transfer requests for records to be stored at one of NARA’s 18 Federal Records Centers over the past year. Those requests represent a cumulative 930,000 cubic feet of records. Records are stored at the FRCs until final disposition.

“The surge was real,” Haralampus said.

While the deadline for submitting analog transfer requests has passed, the Archives and the records centers will still be taking paper records “for a year or two” as NARA officials work through the backlogs of requests, Haralampus said.

But in the future, most records transfer requests will be measured in bytes rather than cubic feet.

“It is exciting and scary to realize at some point within our careers . . . we will have moved to fully electronic records management,” Haralampus said.

The move away from paper

The shift to electronic record-keeping has been more than a decade in the making. The Obama administration issued requirements for agencies to eliminate paper “to the fullest extent possible” in a 2012 directive.

In 2019, the Trump administration set a deadline of Dec. 31, 2022, for when NARA would stop accepting paper records from agencies.

“The federal government spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and thousands of hours annually to create, use, and store Federal records in analog (paper and other non-electronic) formats,” the June 2019 memo from the Office of Management and Budget stated. “Maintaining large volumes of analog records requires dedicated resources, management attention, and security investments that should be applied to more effectively managing electronic records.”

At the time, many agencies were confidently transitioning from paper to digital records. The memo sparked a flurry of additional digitization activities across government.

But COVID-19 tripped up those plans. And even without the pandemic, many agencies said they would have struggled to digitize their legacy records in time due to resource constraints.

After one-third of agencies signaled they wouldn’t meet the 2022 deadline, the Biden administration extended the cutoff date to June 30 of this year.

NARA exceptions to e-records deadline

Even after NARA clears through the backlog of requests, agencies will still be able to transfer analog records in some cases.

Haralampus said NARA has so far approved 24 exceptions to the requirements, with 20 exception requests still under consideration.

In addition to NARA no longer accepting analog record transfer requests, agencies were also required to shut down their own records storage facilities.

But Haralampus said NARA granted an exception for the FBI to continue operating its Central Records Complex in Winchester, Va. “It makes sense,” she said. “The government has invested so much. And those records are of such a sensitive nature.”

In another case, NARA approved the Environmental Protection Agency’s exception request to continue operating its new National Digitization Centers.

In addition to granting specific agency requests, NARA is also finalizing a government-wide exception for official personnel folders and employee medical files. That means agencies will still be able to transfer paper personnel records to NARA’s National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) for the foreseeable future. Haralampus said NARA will soon release more guidance on managing federal personnel records.

And even though some agencies will still be managing paper and analog records, Haralampus said the continuing work to digitize legacy records and adopt electronic processes shows a continuing commitment to the e-records goals.

“If we as the government are as a whole are getting down to talking about exceptions for specific agencies and specific record series, that means the big picture has been taken care of,” she said. “Big things have moved in the right direction with business processes, workflows, how we’re managing all of our records electronically.”

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