Over the coming months, we will be making minor changes to our website. We will be reorganizing our pages to to make it easier to find the resources from these pages. We have started with reorganizing and consolidating the records management guidance and regulations pages.
We wanted to inform you in case any existing bookmarks need to be updated. We wanted to assure you that links to individual resources, such as NARA Bulletins or FAQs, will not change.
We are always looking to improve our website. Please leave a comment below or email us at PRMD@nara.gov if you have any suggestions or feedback you’d like to share.
Hi Beth, Thank you for the heads up. Would it be possible for your division to publish the updated links, organized by general topic here (on Records Express) or elsewhere on archives.gov as a NARA resource maybe as a toolkit or guide for those of us who refer to or provide them to others on a routine or basis?
Thank you for considering.
Kind Regards, Karen Shaw
Thank you for your comment! We appreciate the good suggestion.
I use the Records Control Schedules search almost daily. While it does the job, there are definitely improvements that can be made. In my personal experience, the following changes to the search capabilities would make searching the schedules easier and faster:
– Searching in multiple values at once. Example: Searching full text and record group at the same time.
– Boolean search abilities or an “advanced” search function.
– “Fuzzy” searching. Example: Being able to find similar words or text, especially when typos are made. I’ve used searches that do fuzzy searching and it’s really fantastic.
– Ability to target the years approved. Example: I like finding schedules that are less than 5 years old because these are more relevant and better worded just because needs have changed over time.
– Rating searches by relevance.
These are just a few of the changes I have thought of when using the RCS search boxes; I do realize these are not necessarily “minor” and definitely can’t be done overnight. However, I think it may be something to consider.
Thanks for the opportunity to comment!
Thank you for your comment! We know searching is a problem and find the limitations as frustrating as you do. Our goal is to improve the searching using some of the methodologies you suggest like Boolean searching and faceted searching, which would include being able to limit/filter searches by record group, for example. Early in 2017 we made some improvements to the RCS, such as adding the capability to indicate whether schedules are inactive, as well as some back-end tools that made the site much easier for us to manage. We hope to make further, iterative improvements in the future. Thanks for the feedback. Your feedback helps us to prioritize improvements.