Richard E. Barry,
Principal, Barry Associates www.mybestdocs.com
Cofounder, Open Reader Consortium www.openreader.org
Email:
rickbarry [at] aol [dot] com
NHPRC: Testimony to The House Committee on
Appropriations, Subcommittee on Treasury, Transportation, Housing and Urban
Development, the Judiciary and District of Columbia (T-THUD)
April 24, 2005
My name is Richard E. Barry.
I am a consultant in information and records management, based in Arlington,
Virginia. I have served a wide array of clients at the federal, state and local
levels of government as well as in the private and non-profit sectors in North
America, Europe, Africa, Australasia, Latin America/Caribbean, including
several national archivists. My professional paper and biography may be found
on my Website at www.mybestdocs.com.
I thank the Committee for
seriously considering the budget of the National Historical Publications and
Research Commission (NHPRC), the research-funding arm of the National Archives
and Records Administration (NARA) and for the opportunity to present this
testimony. Your reconsideration of the NHPRC budget is important because of the
ill-understood importance by civil society of the work of NARA and NHPRC to our
country and the risk of this resulting in NHPRC being eliminated and/or
rendered ineffective in the current budget under your consideration. Most
unfortunately, as was clearly pointed out in a report that I authored, Report
on the Society and Archives Survey, 29 January 2003, the
importance of the role of records and recordkeeping in the protection of human rights; creating and maintaining public
confidence in government; enabling government by the rule of law; and promoting
democracy through public accountability of its officials. Archives and records
management (ARM) professionals at all levels need to do a vastly better job, no
doubt, in changing this situation. ARM professionals are not typically well
trained in outreach and public communications and by nature often prefer to
remain out of the limelight. In any case they cannot alone do the needed job.
Those who make some of the greatest use of public records and who depend on
them in their daily professional lives also must step forward and publicly
acknowledge their reliance on trustworthy public records as well. This includes
numerous professional groups including historians, journalists, auditors,
inspectors general, lawyers, jurists and, respectfully, legislators in the US
Congress and related state and local governments.
Apart
from NHPRC’s highly acclaimed work in documenting our American heritage, I will
speak to the area of its work with which I am more familiar. NHPRC has been at
the forefront of important research to address one of the major threats to
continuing availability of and access to public records – the advent of
electronic systems most of which might be said are recordmaking systems but not recordkeeping
systems. I know of no other institution that has been responsible for more
important work in addressing this set of problems. As much as computer-based
systems have the potential to improve personal and organizational efficiency,
they have become so efficient that they have virtually eliminated the
traditional gatekeepers of paper records, the clerical staff who typed up
official communications and saw to it that copies were appropriately filed.
Similarly, as I will illustrate with testimony from the “trenches”, we are
witnessing the decimation of related staff whose role was to ensure that those
records found their way into organizational file centers and, for the most
important of those records, into the National Archives. That gap hasn’t been
filled. NHPRC has actively supported numerous projects to find solutions to
these trends.
We
now face a conundrum: more records are being produced than ever before due to
the convenience of word processing, electronic mail, instant messaging, Web
logs (blogs) and other forms of digital records – nearly all of which are
produced by the authors or systems of the related documents – and the volume of
such records is rising exponentially. How will we capture and keep the
important records? At the same time, we are systematically decreasing the size
and seniority of ARM staff in many agencies, where more highly skilled and paid
staff are what is needed, while at the same time adding new responsibilities in
many cases, such as the review of complex information systems, responding to
FOI requests, privacy, etc. One federal agency historian whom I quoted in an
editorial I wrote for Federal Computer
Week, "Saving
the future now: Commentary," said that the system to maintain
federal records has "collapsed utterly…It will be impossible to write the
history of recent diplomatic and military history as we have written about World
War II. Too many records are gone, and with [them] public accountability of
government and rational public administration." Among the responses I
received from that editorial was one from a federal records manager, just as I
received it except for my changes in brackets to mask the agency of the
individual:
“I am glad to see people write about recordkeeping issues. You are correct that Agency heads, legislators, journalists, auditors, lawyers, and historians do not support recordkeeping practices, sound or otherwise….[We do] not audit records. [We] should look at this practice for long-term important documents. You have personnel destroying permanent documents. No discipline except for maybe a slap on the hand…Up to the early 90s recordkeeping was in pretty good shape. We had the salaries and the personnel to perform the mission. However, in the late 80s and early 90s is when we started getting the cuts in personnel. My office was reduced from 11 people (GS11…GS4) down to 3 people (GS9…GS4)…We are trying to handle the same programs and the same reponsibilities. We (records managers) are suppose to review all automated programs that will retain data to ensure they meet recordkeeping and Privacy Act requirements. Do you really believe a GS13 is going to listen to a GS9 or below when it comes to automation programs. Will a GS14 department head… listen to a GS5. Not really. We are no longer able to go out and evaluation offices on their recordkeeping practices as we did in the 80s. This practice ensured records were being kept and long-term records were being captured and turned in for forwarding to Federal Records Centers and to NARA. Even the development of electronic storage systems will not curb the destruction of long-term records…Since recordkeeping is such a low priority, actions officers do not attend this type of training. Also, we do not have the staff to conduct such training…As an Installation Records Manager, I am only able to devote a small percentage of my time to recordkeeping. My other duties are marked as higher priorities…Until Congress takes the bull by the horns, DOD will not change its recordkeeping practices.”
Certainly
agency heads must elevate the role of recordkeeping in their organizations.
Certainly, in my view, NARA requires more legislative clout to require it.
However, the work of NHPRC is also pivotal in underwriting research that
addresses the technological and other aspects of electronic records. I can
speak to the value and importance of work that NHPRC from personal experience
while an active consultant in past years peer reviewing proposals for their
research grants and having served on advisory committees of some of the most
important electronic records research projects that NHPRC or anyone else has
funded, including: the University of Pittsburgh Functional Requirements for
Evidence in Recordkeeping, regarded as one of the most important resources on
electronic records planning and implementation in the US and internationally;
the Indiana University Electronic Records Projects which made great strides in
tackling the very difficult and very important issue of how trustworthy records
can be captured from modern financial and human resources systems, often called
enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that has led to the very important
Kuali Project www.kualiproject.org/, and the linking of the records and audit
functions, essential to any evaluation of effective management; and the South
Carolina State Department of Archives and History training for State CIOs and
other information management and ARM professionals, which provided a model for
bringing the CIO and ARM communities to a better understanding of electronic
records systems, the implementation of which requires the strong coordination
of both groups. More recently, NHPRC has supported the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to
conduct research on long-term preservation of, and access to,
software-dependent electronic records. This project, more than any other of which
I am aware, has the greatest potential for addressing the most intractable of
all electronic records issues: how will we capture and preserve the nation’s
heritage through its increasingly born-digital electronic records for the life
of the Republic. In all of these projects, I can testify from personal
consulting work that state and local levels of government and academia are
counting heavily on this and other NHPRC projects to sort out the same problems
at their levels, because they do not have the resources to do it themselves.
Thus, you may be certain that NHPRC not only serves the needs of the federal
government, but those of the state and local government levels as well.
I
urge the Committee to restore and increase the NHPRC budget to a level needed
to continue progress in this important, if unheralded, national asset area.
Thank you.
Richard
E. Barry