Proceedings

Abstract:

As more and more government transactions are conducted via e-Government, records will increasingly be created in native digital formats. These formats are subject to rapid technological obsolescence. Over time, reproducing an electronic record is challenging because the conventions for representing information in digital form change along with hardware and software. Newer systems may not be able to process older formats, or may do so incorrectly.

The National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA's) Electronic Records Archives (ERA) program goal is to preserve electronic records in a way which keeps all of their essential properties - as records - intact, when enabling users to access the records using state-of-the-art technology at any time in the future. This means being able to reproduce electronic records without dependence on specific hardware and software formats, and to do so while guaranteeing the authenticity of the records.

ERA will be a comprehensive, systematic, and dynamic means for preserving virtually any kind of electronic record, free from dependence on any specific hardware or software.

Persistently preserving records would entail encoding of record attributes, behaviors, content, and structure into an encapsulated object. This object would then represent all information required to re-instantiate the record at a future time. A parallel approach would be implemented to re-instantiate aggregates of records, such as files and series. By expressing record properties in such formal models, this approach will reduce hardware and software characteristics. Software mediators will enable future technologies to interpret the models and the metadata.

Given the expectation of continuing change in information technology, preservation strategies will need to evolve over time. Preservation methods, then, include not only the methods for maintaining, reproducing and arranging records, but also methods for migrating or transforming the digital components of electronic records from one format to another.

This presentation will describe how - in order to preserve the electronic records - ERA will need to transform them to a persistent common format. A human readable, flexible, open, standardized, self-describing and extensible modeling language - such as XML - will be needed to preserve the content, context, and structure of records. In addition, XML will also play a role as language to support record metadata description.