 All right, welcome everyone to today's call, how to prepare transfer requests in ERA 2.0. Please note that our audio connections are muted until the Q&A portion of the call. And if you are not a speaker, please make sure that your video is off. I will give you instructions on how to ask a question at the end of the meeting, however, you may submit questions via the chat throughout the meeting and they will be answered at the end of the conference. If you will have closed captioning, there is usually a window that does open behind the WebEx screen if you need closed captioning. And if you have any technical issues, please send a chat to the host event producer. And with that, I'll hand the call over to Arian Ravanabash, Supervisory of Policy and Program Team. Please go ahead. Thank you. Hello and welcome to our webinar on how to prepare transfer requests in ERA 2.0. My name is Arian Ravanabash and I will be serving as the moderator this afternoon. During this webinar, representatives from our custodial units here at the National Archives will cover topics such as the differences between ERA Base and ERA 2.0, the difference between textual records transfers and transfers of electronic records, as well as the transfer methods for electronic records. All attendees should have received the slides via email. After the webinar, we will be posting the recording of the presentations. With that out of the way, I would like to turn the webinar over to our first speaker, Eleanor Saxton from the Textual Records Division. Eleanor, good afternoon. Hi, thank you, Arian. As Arian said, I'm Eleanor Saxton. I'm the Accessioning Coordinator for the Archives II Textual Records Division. Next slide, please. I'm going to be speaking to the differences and continuities between ERA Base and ERA 2.0. So the most obvious change is that the system looks completely different. The most important cosmetic change is the dashboard, which shows transfer requests that actively need your attention. The slides linked to an excellent orientation video, walking through the features of the new system as they appear for an approving official, I do recommend it. Another major change is the roles in ERA 2.0. They're structured very differently. In ERA Base, each action or permission had a role associated with it, and accordingly you would need multiple roles to accomplish multiple different types of tasks. On the other hand, in ERA 2.0, each user has one role for transfer and one role if you work on scheduling for scheduling. Roles with greater permissions have all of the capabilities of the less permissive roles built in. The slides linked to the user manual on this, which has a lot more detail, but in short, transferring officials can create and reassign transfer requests. Approving officials can do everything the transferring officials can do and can also review and propose transfer requests. The next major change is the ERA 2.0 statuses. ERA Base had a system of statuses and versions that could be a little confusing. ERA 2.0 simplifies this down to just one copy of each TR. The status name reflects the most recent signatory action taken on the transfer request. So for example, a transfer request which NARA decided we could not approve will be in either returned or rejected status in the ERA 2.0. This is opposed to ERA Base where those statuses went back to draft and could not be distinguished from transfer requests which had never been proposed. In ERA 2.0, a returned status transfer request can be resubmitted and a rejected status transfer request cannot. ERA Base also had two other forms for specific pieces of the transfer request of the accessioning process, that is, the transfer processing results form and the legal transfer instrument form. Those have both been subsumed into the transfer request in the ERA 2.0. Copies of all three forms have been exported from ERA Base and are attached to the migrated transfer request in ERA 2.0 in case you need them. The next major change is editability. In ERA Base, transfer requests were only editable when they were in draft status. In ERA 2.0, transfer requests are editable throughout the accessioning process. And finally, or next, another major change is the ERA 2.0 has an assignment feature. Each transfer request can be assigned to exactly one user at a time, and that user is the only person who can act on the TR, the only person who can edit it, the only person who can move it to another status. So if you find that you can't act on a TR that you need to work with, the first thing to check is to make sure that it's assigned to you. And finally, search looks a lot different now. The slides link to a detailed guide on how to search in ERA 2.0, which I recommend. There are two search options. The basic search looks at one field at a time and allows wild cards. The advanced search lets you look for transfer requests that meet specific criteria in multiple fields. For those of you familiar with Boolean searching, advanced search is an AND type search. It's quite powerful. I use it almost daily. Next slide, please. The next thing I wanted to speak to is the annual move, since we've recently kicked off the 2024 annual move. The first bullet point on the slides links to an excellent job aid that walks through the detailed steps for locating and proposing annual move transfer requests. And that covers everything I'm going to say right now and more. Newly created draft annual move transfer requests will appear in approving official dashboards. If your agency has one approving official, they will appear in the my tasks tab without approving official. If your agency has multiple approving officials, they will appear in the unassigned tasks tab. Approving officials can take a transfer request directly from draft status to proposed status themselves. But if you need to reassign these transfer requests to a transferring official or a different approving official, use the reassign function. This can be done one TR at a time using the menu that appears when you click on the three vertical dots next to your TR. Or it can be done in bulk by checking the boxes next to each transfer request and then using the bulk, the reassign option from the bulk action list. If you want to search for all transfer requests from your agency, we recommend an advanced search. There's a user field down at the bottom. You can fill in the name of the annual move as the user. So if you want to search for all of your 2024 transfer requests, just fill in 2024 annual move as the user and they will all appear in whatever status they're currently in. Next slide, please. The slide lists field names that have changed and fields that have been combined from ERA base to ERA 2.0. The field names on the transfer request form have been tweaked in several ways for increased clarity and usability. I think you all will agree with me that accession title is a much clearer field name than transfer group description was. I do want to emphasize, though, that the underlying data is the same. All we did was change the names of the fields. For example, information that appeared in the transaction number field in ERA base will now appear in the tracking number field on the migrated TR in ERA 2.0. Next slide, please. We did make a couple more substantive changes to transfer request fields, which I'm going to cover on this slide. First, we removed two fields that were not providing useful information to us, the use restriction fields, and for non-electronic records, we removed the physical media type field. We also added one major new field in the access restriction section for controlled unclassified information. The field is called our subjects, our record subject to controlled unclassified information, CUI controls, with the options being yes and no. If you select yes, then the safeguarding and dissemination authority field appears and is required. What we're looking for as a safeguarding or dissemination authority is either the CFR or statutory citation that controls access to the records as listed in the CUI registry. I've linked to the CUI registry on the slide. We know this is a new field. If you have any questions about whether your records are CUI or what safeguarding and or dissemination authority applies to them, please contact your agency CUI officer. One final field I wanted to speak to is the transfer details, which is changed. In ERA base, you needed to provide the number of containers of each box type. So if you had a two-box transfer where one was an FRC box and one was a legal size Hollander, you would just say that there was one of each. In ERA 2.0, we need an additional piece of information. We need the container numbers, the identifying numbers written on the outside of those boxes as well. So you would say you have one FRC, numbered one, and one legal Hollander, numbered two, in your two-box transfer. Next slide, please. And finally, there are several important things that have not changed at all. First is the transfer request numbers. Forms that migrated from ERA base to ERA 2.0 have the same transfer request number. Another thing that hasn't changed is the DAA and DAL numbers for record schedules. Any schedule numbers you have in your internal documentation that start with a DAA or a DAL prefix are the same between the two systems. Last thing that hasn't changed is our accession and documentation requirements. We still require finding aids for all transfers. And for classified records, we require an NA-14130 form or equivalent documenting the results of your declassification review. For classified records, we also require certification that the records have undergone Kailot review. For those of you who routinely transfer classified records to us, this should all be familiar. There's no change. That's the end of my slides. With this, I'll turn it over to Rebecca Baker, the accessioning branch chief for our electronic records division. Thank you, Ellie. Next slide, please. So I would like to discuss some of the major differences between transferring electronic records and textual records. So first of all, electronic records are typically not stored in FRCs or the Federal Records Center program facilities across the country. So these transfers to NARA do not involve archives, and that's one major difference between the annual move transfers that are typically the textual accessions. So as a result, proposed transfers of electronic records are typically direct offers rather than any annual move. We may receive annual move accessions, but that is by far the exception. The records that make up a proposed electronic records accession should be in file formats that are suited for long-term preservation. NARA has developed bulletin 2014-04, which established file format guidance for the transfer of permanent electronic records. That bulletin contains a table appendix that has preferred and acceptable file formats for each category of records that NARA expects to receive. I would highly recommend reviewing that appendix and ensuring that you are incorporating use of these file formats into your agency work process that creates records, ensuring that the systems of records that you're using throughout your agencies can export into file formats that conform with this guidance. And we also have contacts if you have any questions about file formats. Our appendix is not an exhaustive list of every file format that is accessible, so we are evaluating these as file formats change. But you can see that by and large, the majority of different types of programmatic records that an agency may create are represented in that list. So in addition to complying with finding or file format requirements, we also have finding aid requirements. And finding aids are documentation that must be transferred with electronic records or all transfers of records to NARA. For electronic transfers, this is typically metadata spreadsheets that comply with NARA bulletin 2015-04, the metadata guidance for transfer of permanent electronic records, which established a minimum set of metadata that you should be using to describe your records. And these links will also be in the slides so you can see for more information about what metadata we have as required. And then one really big difference between textual records and electronic to note is that custody is taken for electronic records after they're preserved in our ERA 2.0 repository. And this is because the staff at NARA have to perform validation and verification tasks to ensure that the files are well-formed and do not need replacement records or additional documentation. And this is quite different than boxes of textual records where as long as you have that finding aid requirement where you have the list, your box list, the folder list, everything makes sense, there's still going to be that conservation element. But for electronic records, we actually have to do a bite-wise comparison and make sure that we've received every file, the files are well-formed, they're not corrupt, they can open. They aren't encrypted or password protected or anything that could hinder access. So that's one big difference is that agencies need to keep a copy until we take custody of those records. And this is fulfilling CFR requirements that the agency needs to keep a copy for that time period, depending on the backlog, since our unit is accessioning direct offers from every federal agency in the government, essentially. We'll have a backlog of accession so the time it takes to take custody is variable. I think it definitely depends on the size of the transfer, the complexity of the transfer and such. But we have accessioning POCs that you'll see later in the presentation, a contact information that you can check in on anything and we may be reaching out to you if we see any problems like replacement files or more documentation. So the one thing to help out facilitating these transfers is that back in March of 2022, the Electronic Records Division had worked with our Office of Innovation, the National Archives catalog and they developed a GitHub repository and this GitHub repository on the U.S. National Archives GitHub repo since we have a few. It's specifically for electronic records accessioning support tools and this provides tools that are free available to the public. They're Java JAR files that you, of course, want to go through your IT process to get approval to use. But we have tools like FileLister that can help you extract metadata elements from a directory of files and a file compare tool to compare file list, a junk file finder tool to find empty files, empty folders and hidden files and such as well as a funny file name finder to find any characters and file names that don't match ASCII standards like symbols or punctuation and such that can cause preservation issues when you're moving from one area to the next or transferring those files to us. So we definitely encourage agencies to explore our GitHub. We have PDF documentation files for each tool and to check those out and please use them because then it gives us more documentation and information about mixed session. We run the tools ourselves here and it gives us just more data points to get along with the records which is much appreciated and they can be pointed to directories. So as long as your files can be discoverable in a directory location, so that could be something like SharePoint, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box or just a shared network drive or removable media. As long as you have that configuration, you can point and run the tools and export in those cases of CSV log. So I will move on from this slide. So this slide is a visual that shows the process of proposing an electronic records transfer to NARA starting from the draft stage to ultimately having custody being accepted by the National Archives. So your agency records management staff are going to draft a transfer request and that could be either the approving or transferring official. And then the approving official is going to review those drafts and ultimately propose the transfer request to NARA. Once the TR has been proposed to NARA, your accessioning point of contact will get a notification within the ERA 2.0 system and review the TR and decide whether they have all the information they need to approve, reject or return the accession for revision. I think we're going to answer a rejection question that was asked in the chat later in the presentation and we typically will have this open dialogue with our agencies since we're doing direct offers to if there's modifications that need to be made, adding documentation, ensuring that the records are eligible according to the schedule and such. And once that TR gets into the process where it's ready to be approved, we being the electronic records archivist will work with the agency to transfer the records through our approved methods of transfer, which are currently SFTP or external media. And when the records are now at NARA, we will perform a series of validation and verification steps to ensure that the records are not corrupt, they match the schedule, they're well-formed, and they have an adequate documentation and ability to be described. If we run into any issues, like I said, we may reach out to the agency for more documentation or replacement files, files in a different format that may be more accessible. And once the records are processed, we will then create descriptions that we'll use for the National Archives Catalog. The agency finding aids help us develop these descriptions, so we appreciate any descriptive information that you can give us if they're code lists, data dictionaries for databases, any finding aids, any type of documentation is much appreciated. And then once we have our process and verification complete, our descriptions ready, we are uploading the records into our ELA 2.0 repository for in long-term preservation, and we'll begin closing out the exception, which includes accepting custody. And once that custody is accepted, we will formally notify the agency via email, and that notification the agency can use to then enact disposition and they can dispose of their copy of the records. If the agency would like for reference purchases to hold on to a copy of the records, that's okay, as long as they acknowledge that NARA has legal custody of the record copy and that NARA is now under the obligation for any FOIA responses and such. But we have had examples where agencies like to hold on to copies of records and that's been an okay working relationship. So I think we can move on to the next slide. So here I'm going to transition into our electronic records transfer methods. And I'll first we'll discuss what we currently do and then we'll discuss like looking towards forward to the future with, and that'll be when I turn it over to my colleague, Billy. So as far as SFTP, which is a current approved method, this is only for unclassified records. So that's one big important element is do not try to SFTP any classified materials to NARA at this time. And we typically are working with an agency once the transfer request has been approved in ERA 2.0. We have the TR, we already know about the records. The National Archives will email a designated point of contact at the agency, a time-sensitive SFTP link. Currently each link has a 30 gigabyte limit. So we highly recommend that agencies zip their files into a zip container. And this helps if you have quite a few files that you're transferring to us, you can zip them. And we can send you more than one link if needed. So if you're trying to send us 60 gigabytes, we can send you two links. And with the compressive files and metadata, we'll make sure that everything you intended to send us, we were able to receive and extract. And those links are only active for 14 days. We can send you new links if links expire, but we do ask if you're ready to SFTP to please have those records ready to send and upload. And we have facilitated large transfers where we'll do multiple SFTP links. Next slide, please. And then the last slide that I'll be covering is the electronic transfer media. So this is for both unclassified or classified records. And this is currently the only approved transfer method for classified records that are ready to be transferred to the National Archives. And we can accept a series of magnetic tape formats, optical discs, external hard drives, U.S. speed drives. And you can see on this visual, we have a picture that shows various media types. Some of the media types in this picture document the legacy media that we may receive or have received in the past. And we do ask that agencies please maintain awareness and compliance of their CFR requirements for the 10-year copy of any media onto new verified electronic media. And that helps facilitate if you're managing your records on external media that they still are accessible, have content, have not been degraded or bit rot, and that you're moving from older media types like floppy disk and such to more modern media types. Because NARA may not accept a transfer if you only have them in legacy media and if you cannot read them yourselves. If you have things like floppy disks that you can't read, we do recommend that the agency contact a GSA approved data recovery service. And agencies should contact and consult with their accession archivist on the best transfer method for their records. And again, that contact information will be provided at the end of this presentation. We can accommodate transfers where we've done hard drives or for very large volumes and such and coordinate sending those back to get more media. So please don't hesitate if you have a lot of media or you have a high volume of electronic records eligible for transfer. We're here to discuss that with you. And now I'll be turning it over to Billy. Thank you. Next slide. Thanks, Rebecca. And hello, everyone. I'm Billy Wade and I'm chief at a still picture branch. Now in the next couple of slides, I want to go over current and future methods of electronically transferring records into ERA 2.0. We first are going to start with cloud to cloud transfer, which is the transfer electronic records directly from an agency's cloud storage bucket into ERA 2.0. ERA 2.0 is currently an Amazon Gov cloud. NAR does not yet have an operational capability for cloud based transfers from agencies. We do not yet have to have a timeframe for when we will implement such capabilities. In 2022, we conducted a pilot transfer of permanent federal records from one agency to NAR within AWS Gov cloud, Amazon Gov cloud. NAR is considering criteria for further testing with agencies. We will continue to test cloud based transfers to ERA 2.0 using our own digital content. Currently, several NAR offices are successfully moving digital surrogates and more digital records from our own AWS Gov cloud buckets outside of ERA into ERA 2.0 storage. Next slide. Now I'm going to talk about direct upload into ERA 2.0. This is basically an agency directly uploading into the system using the ERA 2.0, ERA 2.0 upload web interface. Initially, only a select number of agencies who have electronic records eligible for transfer will work with NAR, a sessioning archivist to upload records directly into ERA 2.0. We need to implement additional enhancements and functionality before a full rollout to all agencies. If you have electronic records ready for transfer, you must contact your sessioning archivist associated with your transfer to determine if direct upload via ERA 2.0 is the appropriate means of transfer for your records. Next slide. With this next couple of slides, we just have some useful links and contact information. This one is useful links for those transferring records. We have the ERA training materials link at archives.gov. The ERA 2.0 job training aid is the sessioning guidance of policy and the FOQs about transferring permanent electronic records to NARA. And then our last slide. And this is the sessioning contacts here at NARA. We actually have the homepage for textual records. Also the emails for their electronic records division. And then also the three special media branches, moving image and sound, still pictures, and cardiac graphic. Now back to Arden. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Billy. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Ellie, for the informative presentations.