The NARA draft strategic plan has been updated and submitted to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for their review. We want to offer our sincere thank you to all who provided us with comments and questions.
We made a number of changes to this version. The most obvious change is that we added narrative descriptions for each objective. These new narratives better describe the current state and our vision for the future, as well as identify strategies for how we plan to achieve each objective.
Two of the changes most related to federal records management are:
- By FY 2020, NARA will have policies and processes in place to support Federal agencies’ transition to fully electronic recordkeeping. We added this new objective under our Strategic Goal Connect with Customers based on comments from our customer Federal agencies who asked us to make a commitment to assist them in transitioning to a fully electronic environment.
- By December 31, 2022, NARA will, to the fullest extent possible, no longer accept transfers of permanent or temporary records in analog formats and will accept records only in electronic format and with appropriate metadata. We added the phrase “to the fullest extent possible” based on extensive feedback from both staff and external commenters. We modified the language of this objective to recognize that NARA may need to accept a limited number of analog records after the December 31, 2022 deadline.
We will be talking about the draft strategic plan at the upcoming Agency Services BRIDG meeting on October 16th.
The fullest extent possible is not really “realistic” because of all the casefiles that are retained from several different programs in paper format and some go back atleast 50-100 years and are perpetual. Thank you, Sandra Gourdin