Transfer Guidance Webinar

Next week, we will host a webinar about NARA transfer guidance and the effort underway to revise this guidance. This session is an encore of the session offered on February 13 and will be held on Thursday, February 28 at 11:00 AM Eastern.

As the nation’s records manager, The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is charged with ensuring that all records identified as being permanently valuable are transferred in accordance with their disposition schedules. As the nation’s archives, NARA is responsible for providing permanent access to those same electronic records and recognizes that the greater the variability in the file formats used to encode records, the more complex and costly it will be to manage them over time. NARA has developed transfer guidance products that identify sustainable, standards-based file formats as way of ensuring that electronic records will remain accessible for as long as they are needed. Unfortunately, agencies often use formats that do not meet NARA’s requirements and as a result the transfer process often involves negotiations over how to proceed.

NARA is currently revising this guidance to identify additional sustainable formats in recognition of both the changes that have taken place in the marketplace and also the greater management capabilities provided by the Electronic Records Archives.This presentation will provide a history of NARA’s transfer guidance and describe the current effort to revise it.

There are a limited number of seats available for this presentation. To register, please visit  http://nara.ilinc.com/public. This webinar is a part of a series of free webinars that NARA is offering to help Federal agencies meet the challenges of a complex and evolving records management environment. To receive more information regarding upcoming sessions, please send a request to workshop@nara.gov.