 Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this webinar on Open Government at the National Archives. My name is Meredith Stewart. I help lead the development of the Open Government Plan for the National Archives and Records Administration, also known as NARA. Today we will provide you a brief overview of our Open Government efforts. But what we're really interested in is listening to your ideas and suggestions on what we should be doing or what we can do to improve our efforts in the next two years. In that spirit, this is an interactive webinar. We need to hear your ideas and we'd like to answer your questions. We have chat available in the webinar. You can also raise your hand to share your ideas or ask a question over the phone. Please also check out History Hub, a new collaborative site we are piloting. Create a login and submit your ideas at historyhub.archive.gov. Community. Open. Government. Throughout the webinar, Meg Phillips, our External Affairs Liaison, will be monitoring all of the ideas and questions submitted and bringing those into the conversation. Now we will hear about the webinar software from our moderator, Jamie, who will be assisting us today. Jamie? Thank you. You can adjust the view of today's presentation by pressing the Control and Plus or the Control and Minus button on your keyboard. As Meredith mentioned, you are welcome to submit written questions and ideas during the presentation. To do so, please use the Note function on the lower right-hand side of your screen and address your questions to all moderators. You can raise your hand by pressing pound two on your telephone keypad which will notify the speakers that you wish to ask a verbal question. If at any time you need a technical assistance, please send a note to the ATT-CEF operator. And with that, I'd like to turn it back to Meredith. Great. Thanks, Jamie. Now it is my honor to introduce the Archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero. On November 6, 2009, he was confirmed as the 10th Archivist of the United States. Early in 2010, he worked to implement the President's commitment to open government and strengthen the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration at the National Archives and Records Administration. To better position NARA to fulfill these goals, Mr. Ferriero initiated an agency transformation in 2010 and restructured the organization and set goals to further our mission, meet the needs of those who rely on us, and find new creative ways to approach work. He has opened the archives in unprecedented ways through greater online access, social media tools, and through encouraging public participation and celebrating the contributions of citizen archivists. Previously, Mr. Ferriero served as the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Library and in top positions at two of the nation's major academic libraries, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Duke University. Welcome Archivist David Ferriero. Thank you, Meredith, and thanks to all of you who have joined the webinar. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Today we'll be discussing open government, a topic about which I am very passionate. In fact, it's the reason I accepted the President's nomination for this position. To start with, I want to share this quote with you. On January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama welcomed senior staff and cabinet secretaries to the White House. In his remarks, he said, our commitment to openness means more than simply informing the American people about how decisions are made. It means recognizing that the government does not have all the answers and that public officials need to draw on what citizens are. These words underscore our work on open government. Fundamentally, we need to do more to not simply inform, but to really engage the public we serve. The White House's Open Directive Initiative furthers the effort to strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government. On December 8, 2009, the White House issued the Open Government Directive, requiring federal government agencies like the National Archives to make specific progress on open government initiatives and to develop an open government plan and update that plan every two years. We have been meeting that requirement since 2010 and they are now continuing that process by reaching out to you for your ideas and developing our next open government plan for 2016 to 2018. The Open Government Initiative continues to The Open Government Initiative is also an international one. The United States is one of the eight founding members of the Open Government Partnership. Launched in 2011, it serves as an international platform for countries committed to making their government more open, accountable, and responsive to citizens. Today, the partnership has grown to 69 countries around the world. As part of the requirements of the Open Government Partnership, the United States develops an Open Government National Action Plan. We released the third version of that plan in October 2015. Within the National Action Plan, the National Archives plays an important role by leading on commitments for records management, freedom of information, declassification, controlled, unclassified information, and in open innovation activities. Today, we are working to develop our next Open Government Plan for the National Archives, which will be our fourth plan. The Open Government Directive designed agency Open Government Plans to be a public roadmap for incorporating the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration into the mission of agencies. At the National Archives, Open Government has always been part of our mission. After all, we've been providing access to the records of the government and our research rooms since the 1930s. Our current emphasis on Open Government guided us when we refined our mission statement, which is we drive openness, cultivate public participation, and strengthen our nation's democracy to public access to high-value records. In the last five years, we've completed more than 120 Open Government commitments. You're going to hear about some of these accomplishments today from some of the leaders of the National Archives. We have accomplished a lot in strengthening Open Government, but we have more work to do. There is work and improvements we need to make in the coming years, especially in how we serve you. We need to continue to innovate and create a culture of innovation. We need to try new strategies of public engagement, which is one of the reasons why we chose to do this public webinar with you today. Please chime in. It's your webinar. We know that we don't have all the answers we want to draw on what you know and your ideas for improving. Thank you. Thank you, David. Now I would like to introduce Pamela Wright, the Chief Innovation Officer at the National Archives. Thanks for joining us, Pam. Thanks, Meredith. I'm excited to be here and talking with everybody on the line about our Open Government plan. First, I'm going to start off talking about the process for developing the plan, and then we'll go into some of the specifics about the content of the Open Government plan. You can see on this slide images of the three plans we've had since 2010. We're now working on our fourth Open Government plan, which will include commitments over the next two years. We've had a yellow, a blue, and a green plan, and we have not picked out the color yet for the next plan, so if nothing else, you could suggest the color. At NARA, we have an internal working group made up of representatives throughout the agency who meet monthly to coordinate our Open Government efforts. In the last few months, the group has been working to develop our next Open Government plan. Altogether, more than 40 staff members will contribute commitments and content for the plan, and we are on track to publish this plan this summer. As the archivist said earlier, we have completed more than 120 commitments on Open Government since our first plan. Many of these commitments started off as discussions and ideas, either internally in the agency or externally from stakeholders like you. In order to give you a sense of what we're looking for in our next plan, I want to describe some of the highlights from our first three plans. We improved our online catalog, the National Archives catalog, and introduced new features, including user-generated transcription, tags, comments, as well as an API, and we optimized the site for mobile development. We became a founding partner of FOIA Online, a site where the public can electronically request and receive Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, responses from several agencies. The National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the grant-making affiliate of the National Archives, helped launch the Founders' Online Web site, which makes available the historical documents of the Founders of the United States. We implemented researcher-based final indexing and processing at the National Declassification Center, and we released collections of records on human rights in Brazil, on refugee records, and on records related to the Berlin Wall. And another significant accomplishment is that we used the Managing Government Records Directives we issued. I'm sorry, the Managing Government Records Directives in conjunction with the White House. We implemented research-based records directed in conjunction with the White House Office of Management and Budget, as well as electronic records management guidance. On this slide, we have provided you a draft outline of our Open Government Plan. These are the proposed sections that we are currently brainstorming. Please keep these topics in mind as we continue throughout the webinar, and as you think about ideas or feedback you'd like to share. Because our Open Government Plan has many topic areas, we're only talking about a few of the topics today. However, we still want you to share your ideas and feedback on all of these areas, and even beyond the topics on this slide. So right now, we are engaging in a consultation process to develop our next plan. We're reaching out to staff members of civil society or public interest groups, and our stakeholders around the country. In previous plans, we had more than 160 ideas, comments, and suggestions for strengthening transparency, participation, and collaboration at the National Archives. We're hoping for our fourth plan that we can do even better at engaging the public and our staff in the development process. We want to hear your ideas today on the webinar through chat or through phone. After the webinar has concluded, we would encourage you to share your ideas on the Open Government Space on History Hub at historyhub.archives.gov slash open-government or email opengov.gov and please be sure to share your ideas by Friday, April 15th so they can be considered for the next plan. All right, so now I'm going to shift gears just a little bit and talk about what has been the flagship of our previous Open Government Plan, our innovation work at the National Archives. As the Chief Innovation Officer, I've led the development of this section, which is included work on establishing a program strategy and governance board, improving the National Archives catalog in order to provide access to millions of our records online and improving our website, archives.gov, which we have been working to move to Drupal Content Management System and into the cloud, and next year we want to redesign. So send your ideas now on what you'd like on archives.gov. It would be great. On this slide, you can see part where we engage the public on crowd-sourcing projects, like transcription and tagging missions, subtitling videos, and on our most recent pilot, History Hub. History Hub is a site where you can post your questions on researching the records of the National Archives. As you've heard today, we're also using it to gather your ideas on the next Open Government Plan. We've seen a lot of activity on this platform in only a few weeks that it's been up, and there are staff members who help point researchers to records and online resources, as well as records at other institutions like the Library of Congress or Smithsonian. We are even starting to see researchers help each other in their research. This pilot is an extension of the work we've done on our internal collaboration at the National Archives, which has been successful. We learned a lot by leveraging a similar site internally, and now we're experimenting with the site publicly. Our flagship initiative has also included efforts to strengthen our collaboration with external organizations like Wikipedia and the Digital Public Library of America. And last year, we welcomed presidential innovation fellows to NARA to experiment with digital tools to provide greater access to our records. Within the past year, we also launched the Innovation Hub, a collaborative space at the National Archives Building in downtown Washington, D.C., with a scanning lab where volunteers can then make those available in the catalog. The Innovation Hub also hosts events like Editson, Hackathon, and has a Wikipedia exhibit space. We're also working to expand activities that can spark a culture of innovation throughout the agency. All right, so this is the big question. Where do we go from here? What innovations do you think we should be pursuing over the next two years? Is there something you'd like to see on the Citizen Archivist Dashboard that you haven't seen before? Or in the National Archives catalog or in our Innovation Hub? What do you think we should be doing better to serve you and have to be doing it more innovatively? Also, we'd love to hear if there are particular digital tools that would be more helpful to you as you use the records of the National Archives. What are you seeing and using in the institutions you think NARA should know about and try? We want to hear it all from you. Hey, thank you, Pam. It is now my pleasure to introduce and coming Access Coordinator for Research Services at the National Archives and Records Administration. And thank you for joining us. Thank you, Meredith. I am also pleased to be here today to discuss Open Government at the National Archives. Research Services is comprised of 14 archival units and is responsible for 4,380,000 cubic feet of archival holdings from agencies within the Executive Branch. We have 568 staff members and the functions that we complete include sessioning of permanent records, the processing and description of records at a basic level to facilitate access to our holdings through NARA's online archival catalog, completing basic preservation to ensure that future generations will have continued access to our materials and digitizing select series from the permanent holdings to enhance access. In addition to these functions, Research Services provides access to our holdings to on-site and off-site researchers. As part of our services, we provide on-site consultation about our holdings to assist researchers. In 2015, we completed over 47,000 requests for information from off-site researchers. We provide copies of our records through digitization, facsimiles, DVDs, and paper copies. Staff provide additional content to our research group to provide information about our holdings. In 2015, staff provide additional context about our records through various web pages, blogs, and YouTube videos. Finally, Research Services has a FOIA staff that reviews sensitive or restricted permanent materials for possible release. This staff balances access with openness. So, as you can see, our services already support the concepts around open government. But we are here to explore opportunities to improve openness and transparency. So, with this in mind, Research Services has the following questions. What can we do to make your research experience as successful as possible? What new or different kind of research services would you like to see? And how should Research Services communicate or connect with you? We want to provide a positive flow of information both ways. Thank you, Anne. Now I'm going to ask Meg Phillips, our External Affairs Coordinator, to check in. Meg, do you have any comments or questions that you'd like to bring in from chat? Yes, we certainly do. Thank you. We just got a suggestion saying that it would be wonderful if the NARA catalog could be tweaked to allow online ordering of records pulled. This would give researchers more time to be able to use their records to make their records pulled. We also got another suggestion a little bit earlier while Pam was talking, asking if NARA had ever done specific outreach to journalists offering an Archives 101 sort of briefing to journalists on how archives work and how to use them. So thank you very much for those suggestions. We actually just got by chat while I was inserting those. The one that just came in says, what can be done to improve FOIA communications? Right now, once a FOIA has been made, there's no communication until it's completed. Can anything be done to facilitate communication with records with regards to the progress of a FOIA request? Also, could anything be done to improve the public's ability to use a FOIA request to make it easier and more understandable? I think that leaves well into our next section. So we're going to introduce our next presenter, Gary M. Stern, NARA's General Counsel and Chief Freedom of Information Act Officer. Gary, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Meredith. I am NARA's General Counsel. I'm here today, principally in my role as our Chief FOIA Officer. And FOIA is, of course, a vital, but not the only way that the National Archives makes its records available. And just before me, describe how we make access happen to our archival records every day and the vast majority of our archival records, 4 million feet, that's 10 billion pieces of paper in the other formats. We make it available, those records available every day outside and without the need for the use of FOIA. And indeed, we've been providing access to National Archives since 1934 when we were created long before there was a FOIA. And that's our core mission. But FOIA, nonetheless, is an important tool that we use for very complex records that contain lots of sensitive information, have to go through a FOIA review and a FOIA process in our core archival holdings. And we utilize FOIA for seeking access to the records that NARA creates itself as an agency. We call those our operational records. And by the way, you want to mention that in addition to what Anne described, we have records at 13 presidential libraries, seem to be 14 in our Center for Legislative Archives. Now a whole bunch of those records aren't subject to FOIA at all, but the records in the newer presidential libraries that fall into the Records Act also are subject to FOIA. So that's another place where the FOIA becomes essential. And then, as this first slide shows, just a quick summary of the FOIA goals in our current open government plan and the efforts we've tried to do to reduce our backlog and respond more quickly to the FOIA request along the lines that the commenter on chat indicated seeking better improvement because there's no question that at times there can be very long waits in some of our areas where we have very long multi-year backlogs. A requester wants to get an update of where they stand and what's going on, and so that's something we will take into account and try to figure out how to better communicate. We're also trying to modernize and improve our technology, to use technology to help speed up and our processing of complex FOIA requests. And that's what we're hoping to really bring those tools into use when we launch our update of our electronic records archives, the ERA 2.0 we call it, in the coming years. And so we really want further input from you from the next slide in terms of developing our version four of our plan, what other ideas and thoughts do you have to help us come up with new goals and the other person said and ask how can we make it easier to make FOIA requests? That's something that we've already tried to do by helping to launch and utilize what we call FOIA online. It's an online portal that multiple agencies are using, and we're hoping eventually the entire government adopts so it's one place where you can go and with drop-down, find the agency you want online, put in your request. You have to register so that you have contact information so then the agency, whether it's an R or any other agency, can respond back to you, respond to your request, and provide you the records also online. So those are already... that's also a tool we've already been using to improve FOIA, making it easier to respond and to provide the records. That's where we are right now and we welcome your ideas and your feedback. Thank you. Great, thanks, Gary. It is my pleasure to introduce Cheryl Senberger, the director of the National Declassification Center at the National Archives. Thank you for joining the webinar today, Cheryl. Thank you, Meredith. Like the programs that Pam and Ann and Gary talk about, NDC's primary mission is to increase public access to historical records, too. So what does declassification look like at the National Archives in 2016? NDC's focus, just as a reminder to all, is on 25-year-old and older, still classified records series, accession to the archives in College Park. We are applying quality assurance to classified records series for identifying potentially still sensitive national security information within one year of their accessioning here. No more backlogs. With our hands around this quality assurance mission and physical and intellectual control over the classified and declassified holdings, our success with retiring that enormous backlog means we can expand our public interaction and focus more on prioritization. To support that, we established a senior archive specialist position to liaise with the public. She works with College Park reference staff and the researcher to facilitate requests and enhance their understanding of the NDC process. We're using our public website and our blog when new series of records have completed the declassification process and are available for research. And we've expanded this to include specific series that have been through the declassification process and are available for prioritized indexing, as Pam noted earlier. This new indexing on demand feature allows researchers to have a voice as to which records can go to the head of the line. And we're reaching out to you for your comments by way of this webinar and our yearly forums. Our last one was last March, which solicited topics for potential prioritized review and comments about the failings of declassification process. The archives are a historian's best friend, and NDC continues to pay special review attention to historical collections. Pam noted a couple in her action plan highlights, and I'm particularly excited about a project associated with headquarters office file records of the Secretary of Defense, associated with record group 330. That's a request made by some distinguished historians and civil society members, some of whom I'm hopeful are tuning in with us today. To expand our success with prioritization, NDC applied automation to declassification referral notification and tracking. In order to hold agencies accountable to that one-year turnaround written out in the executive order for their referral review, and they're making their deadlines. We've also added a presidential library record focused on our interagency review efforts with a establishment of a limited remote archives capture online review capability at College Park. Gary just talked about FOIA. Our part of FOIA involves the classified FOIA backlog reduction. For FY15, it was 26%. We are aiming to build on that with exploring on-site FOIA consultation and processing, aimed at older, maybe forgotten overlooked, lost cases and requests. Finally, as you all know, the spirit of declassification, transparency, and open government means nothing classified can stay classified forever. That has prompted us to commit to a legacy withdrawn items re-review. It's our special systematic declassification review program for previously reviewed and exempted historical federal records that were accession to the National Archives, but reviewed before the NDC was created. Section 3 of the recently issued U.S. Government National Action Plan 3.0, streamlining the declassification process says, while national security interests require that certain information be protected as classified, democratic principles require government to be transparent wherever possible about its activity. Declassification is a time-consuming and costly process that often involves manual review of records. That last line is particularly important to us at the NDC. So can you help us better target our efforts? We all believe front-end declassification reform is desirable, but what can we do on the back end? How can NDC enact declassification processing reforms on accession to historical records at the National Archives? How about the declassification community? Has it truly applied the concept or the spirit of automatic declassification? Are there topics, themes, document types, or timelines that might be amenable to true automatic declassification? Thank you, Cheryl. Now we're going to take a moment to check in with Meg Phillips to see if there's questions or comments on chat. Hi, Meredith. Thank you. I think there's a little time delay while people think about the presentation, so the comments coming in on chat are not closely related to the people who just spoke, but we did get some really good comments, so I'm going to insert them just because we got them. For the Innovation Hub, we got a suggestion to allow for smaller scanning projects for lesser used series. As long as the series does not include volumes or anything that the research room would not allow to be placed on a photocopier. That's a great idea. We got another suggestion related to FOIA. Regarding FOIA, the speaker asked if there are proactive disclosures of operational records that would be useful. Yes. Coming immediately to mind are the accessioning paperwork when collections are transferred to NARA from agencies. Also, the forms used to appraise records. Adding these would complement the retention forms that have been scanned and are now on the NARA public website. Great. Thanks, Meg. It's actually a great segue into our next presentation. I would like to now introduce Laurence Brewer. Laurence is the Acting Chief Records Officer of the U.S. Government and Director of the Records Management Operations Program at the National Archives and Records Administration. Thank you for joining us today, Laurence. Thank you, Meredith. So I'm batting clean up today. I'm pleased to talk with all of you about what we have accomplished in records management in support of open government. In the Office of the Chief Records Officer, we'd like to say the backbone of a transparent and accountable government is good records management. And we have the t-shirts to prove it. To put it simply, the government cannot be accountable if it does not preserve and cannot find its records. Our office leads records management across the government with an emphasis on electronic records and assesses the effectiveness of federal records management policies and programs. Our staff, which consists of about 100 full-time staff members in the Washington, D.C. area and around the country, works with over 250 different federal agencies in a number of different areas including developing electronic records management policy and guidance, providing records management training to agency records officers, information technology professionals, program managers and legal counsels, conducting inspections and reporting of record-keeping practices to identify where improvements can be made and best practices shared, working with agencies to appraise and schedule either for permanent retention or eventual disposal the records that each agency creates to ensure adequate and proper documentation of our government actions. As Pam mentioned, in August 2012, NARA and the Office of Management and Budget jointly released the Managing Government Records Directive. This watershed document requires that to the fullest extent possible, agencies eliminate paper and use electronic record-keeping to ensure transparency, accountability and efficiency. There are two high-level goals in the directive that we are actively working with agencies on. But first, by December 2016, agencies must manage all their email electronically and that is no more printing and filing. And by December 2019, agencies must manage all permanent electronic records in an electronic format. In our 2014-2016 Open Government Plan, we highlighted a number of projects, some of which have been completed. In September 2013, we held an industry day that focused on identifying solutions to the government's information management challenges. The event was designed to enable industry to better understand the federal information management vision, requirements, priorities and business opportunities. As part of this activity, a request for information was issued asking vendors to describe how their solutions could help automate electronic records management, reducing the burden on agency and users. Over 50 private-sector vendors submitted responses. This led to the publishing of the Automated Electronic Records Management Report and Plan. The report covers the goals of electronic records automation and the plan remains a living document that we update annually. We have also continued the issue of guidance on email management, including the cap-semit approach to managing email, which is a role-based approach that allows agencies to categorize and schedule email records based on the position of the email account owner in the agency. We believe this is an efficient and effective, cost-effective way to meet the requirements of the managing government records directive. NAR has also issued new and expanded guidance that greatly expands the format that agencies can use when transferring permanent records to the National Archives. Our ongoing activities include the work we are doing on the Record Control Schedules repository. For several years now, we have been posting on our public website scanned images of all unclassified, NARA-approved record schedules from 1973 forward. This repository provides agencies and the public with access to agency record schedules and increases transparency into the record scheduling process. Finally, we continue to work on improving our general record schedules, NARA-approved schedules that all agencies may use to identify and disposition records consistently across the government. The new GRS is organized functionally, aggregates related records where possible, includes more flexible retention for temporary records, and includes implementation tools and resources such as frequently asked questions. The new GRS will provide for more effective records management in agencies, making it easier to find current records when requested. Looking ahead to the 2016-2018 plan, I'm very interested in getting your feedback and your comments on a couple of things. A couple of questions here on the slide for you to consider. What additional guidance is needed to ensure that agencies are better able to manage their e-mail and other electronic records? And also, what are emerging technologies, records management related, or not? Do you think we'll have the greatest impact on records and information management in the government? Thank you, Lauren. Now we would like to open the conversation up even more to those of you who have joined us on the webinar. We want to hear and respond to your ideas, comments, and suggestions, and we can also answer your questions. And I'm going to ask for the NARA executive that when you respond, please state your name and position, so that way everyone on the webinar kind of knows who's talking. That will be clear. You can also send your questions in via chat or raise your hand and we can unmute you. We would also like to encourage you to try out the History Hub platform, which we are monitoring, where you can create a login and share your ideas on the open government space. Meg, do we have any questions from chat that have come in? Questions or comments? I have a couple of questions. The first one I think is for Pam. We now have commenting and other ways for the public to interact with NARA through the catalog. And the question is how many and what kinds of comments are we getting? This is Pam, Chief Innovation Officer. That's a great question, Meg. Thank you. We just opened it up, the catalog, to comments. And we really weren't sure what kind of comments we would be getting. We have done a lot of transcription. We have almost 100,000 transcriptions in the catalog and hundreds of thousands of tags already in the catalog, but commenting is new. And so we really weren't sure what we'd be getting. It's been wonderful. The first 10 that came in have actually been edits to the descriptions that we have in the catalog. So we're now looking at how we can take those edits and work those back into the archival staff to see if we need to update the description or what we can do with it. So it's been exciting to get those comments. I think there are people in the public that really want to work with the National Archives and help us make access happen and do the best that we can and these comments are the kinds of evidence that I have for that. Thank you. The next question is, I believe for Cheryl, about declassification. Since presidential records are some of the most interesting historical records, what is the NBC doing to get the presidential records more available? Well, first of all, our primary focus has been on federal records that were not necessarily presidential records. They had a program going and we weren't going to get into their shorts, to speak. But we decided it would be good to work with presidential libraries and presidential records because they are really historically really valuable to public requests, for public requests. And so after a few years we were able to find the space and the resources to set up a couple of online review stations here at College Park. It made it way more convenient for some of the agencies who had said in the past that one of the reasons they weren't able to do a lot of their presidential library reviews was because it was not a convenient location for them to review. I'm happy to say that it started as a very small effort with just a couple of agency interests and now it's expanded to about 10 agencies. A lot of your heavy hitters are coming out here to review records that relate to libraries we're trying to complete like Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon and Ford and some of the Carter. So we have limited space to do this, but we are happy to provide this opportunity. And as more agencies are interested, we expand it to more agencies. Sure. I guess this is Pam again, Chief Innovation Officer. And I just wanted to acknowledge that I see the question on journalism, doing a journalism archives 101 briefing for journalists comes from Andrew Lee who has worked with us in the Innovation Hub with bringing students in for Wikipedia projects. So thanks so much, Andrew, for that idea of Archives 101 for Journalists. I think that's a great idea and I think we probably need it online for other folks as well. I could see that being a really useful tool. Somebody, I think either online or somewhere, I just saw the suggestion that we should have a quick video that explains what we do. And so this kind of goes right along with that. So thanks, Andrew, for that. Another suggestion just came in through chat. It says about monthly, NARA publishes in the Federal Register brief descriptions of record control schedules, pending approval, and seeking public comment. It would be helpful if NARA would proactively post all of the pending records control schedules to some place on their website, along with the associated appraisal reports. Right now, if I'm considering commenting, I have to email a request for those forms and this slows down the approval process. If I could see the forms without having to ask first for them, then it would save everyone some time. This is Lawrence, acting chief record officer. Thank you for the comment. We have received feedback along those lines and it's something that, you know, we should consider making better use of the technology right now as you note the Federal Register and the process that they have outlined is how we run the public review and request process for pending record schedules, but it's something that we could take back, maybe talk to the Federal Register and our specialist here in technology delivery and maybe we can make some progress in that area. Jamie, have any questions come in over the phone? We do not have any in queue and just a reminder to everyone dialed in, you can press sound 2 on your telephone keypad to place yourself into the question queue and ask a verbal question or comment to our speakers. I do have one more question that's for Lawrence, but maybe for others as well, about the upcoming presidential transition. It says with 2016 being a presidential administration transition year, is NARA concerned about the protection of records as senior agency officials change over with the administration? Thank you, Manny. This is Lawrence again. That's a good question and yes, we are certainly concerned. We want to make sure that every agency in the executive branch that is managing a transition, whether our incoming and departing, career executives and political appointees are making sure that the record keeping practices that protect those records are in place. We receive some data in our annual reporting cycle where we ask agencies specifically what actions they're taking and where they are with putting the processes in place and doing the briefings of those officials to make sure that the records are protected. And the data shows us that about 80% of agencies responding are on top of it and have implemented procedures and are briefing their senior officials. And while 80% is not 100%, it's a good data point that shows that there is a lot of attention in most agencies, but we are continuing to work with the other agencies, especially the other 20% and making sure that we provide some tools and guidance. We have some information up on our website which we have shared with agencies and we are working with the partnership or public service that oversees the transition teams for all those federal agencies to make sure that we connect to the right people and agencies to ensure that the records are protected. And I would just add, this is the archivist and I would just add that we recently hosted a meeting of all the senior agency officials for records management and this was one of the items on the agenda reminding them that this is their responsibility to ensure that the records are in proper order during this transition. This is Meg. We have one more suggestion or question that came in through chat. What progress has been made or is being made currently on a unified researcher card system for all facilities and submission of records requests and pull slips digitally or remotely? This is Anne Cummings, Access Coordinator for Research Services. Currently, I believe the executive is still working with the Office of Information Technology on looking at what's available in terms of a unified researcher card system. That's the progress on that at this point and having a unified way for researcher requests for records to be submitted is something that we're all very interested in and we're very hopeful that someday we'll become a reality. Jamie, any questions on the phone? We do not have any questions in the queue. I'm wondering if any of the executives want to address any of the comments that came up earlier in our conversation. And if not, we can go to Meg for some more. Meg, any more questions or comments coming in over chat? We've seen quite a few questions and comments come in over chat and this has actually been pretty successful for us in our first time doing this and kind of opened to the public. We'd encourage you, if you do want to get on the phone, we would be willing to hear your voice and answer your questions directly. We have not done this before but we were guessing about whether people would prefer chat or phone and it looks like you prefer chat. We would be more than happy to get... Oops, I just saw something else come in. Interesting. We just got a question come in through chat related to social media and copyright. When can you use a NARA image in a Twitter profile? I think the question is about NARA images of our record. So can our people freely available able to use the historical images that are in the National Archives catalog that we make available as their Twitter profile? Sure, so I'll start with a catalog. This is Pam and then maybe Ann can follow up. The images that are in the catalog are unrestricted. So you can go ahead and tweet those to your hearts content. We love it. And we have about 10 million digital objects or images in the catalog ready to go. So please feel free to make copies of any of those that you find that are online. And then, Ann, do you want to talk about the ones that are not online? Sure, the ones that are not online, in most instances they are unrestricted. You can use them. But I would caution that you should ask one of the archvists or one of your finding the image to verify particularly for photographs. Sometimes we do have a few copy-rided images. So I would recommend that you ask if you're unsure. And this is Gary Stern in the Nile Pocket General Counsel and Copyright is a legal concept that for the most part, as Ann indicated, does not apply to government records. The Copyright Act specifically excludes government records and government records are in the public domain. And as Ann said, anyone can use them for any purpose. However, we have small bits within our collection that may be and in fact sometimes are subject to copyright. Sometimes we know it. Sometimes we're not sure. And it's really in the photographs, motion pictures, and music that sometimes the government collects or obtains and uses as part of creating a record or an artifact. And sometimes those are subject to copyrights. We do try to explain to the researcher that ultimately the researcher's responsibility to determine appropriate use. There is fair use allowance in the Copyright Act for research purposes often and using small portions of copyrighted material. But the researcher does need to be cognizant, especially those types of the media photos, film, music in which copyrights can still exist. But if you find it in the catalog, go for it and use it. And there's a lot of great stuff in the catalog, a lot of great things that you could share on social media. And if you check out one of our most popular social media sites today's document, you get a wide range of records and images that we're sharing on historical topics. So we've gotten a couple more chat suggestions. They're popping up as we speak. I'm going to stay with the catalog theme with the next one. This comment states that the online catalog is great, but legacy paper finding aids sometimes are helpful for context and browsing is far easier with the paper finding aids. Can they be digitized or at least a browsing experience be created for the online catalog? That is a great question. And something, again, this is Pam Wright, the Chief Innovation Officer, and something that we're really talking about in depth at the National Archives. There are a lot of archivists that understand that researchers really want and really like those tried and true old finding aids, the paper finding aids, and some of them aren't that old. So what can we do online? And what can we do to make finding aids online as useful as those and as browsable as those? And yeah, I agree, the catalog is great, but it can be an ocean that you're dropped into, so how can we change that? So we're talking a lot right now about user-created finding aids in which we put the tools around the catalog or in the catalog so that you can create a finding aid of your own. You just put in the parameters of what you want and have it give you a current state-of-the-art finding aid that's browsable and useful to you. So we are already working on user personas and starting to do requirements so that we can have those kinds of tools in the catalog available to you to make exactly the kind of finding aid you'd like to see. Thank you, Pam. The next question or suggestion is, this really is a question, I think, is for Ann. Can someone describe the recent changes in research services concerning staffing, staff training, and other new issues? So within the last year, research services had, you know, a very exciting thing happen. We got to redefine our Archives Technician position description and what they did and what we wanted them to do with the hopes that we could bring a more knowledgeable staff into the research room to do monitoring and, you know, pools and refiles and whatever else needs to be transpired to provide limited consultation services. In order to do that, we developed a training program that all of them would go through. We're in the first year of it. We're hoping to get the first group or wave of people through it by June. And so, you know, like everything that's the first time through, there's some fits and starts and there's some bumps along the way. But overall, the change has been very positive to both staff and the bulk of the researchers in the research room. We've heard some good things back to them. So that's what's actually happening. Once we get a group through or several groups through the program, we feel that, you know, we'll be making an assessment both from staff perspective and researchers' perspective on what they think of what happens. Hopefully, they'll find it a very positive thing also. Meg, I think we have time for maybe one more question or comment. I have exactly one waiting, but I haven't read you yet. So I do want to encourage people to keep sending them in, however, because we need the input, whether we're able to respond to them live during the webinar or not. So keep sending your input. The last suggestion or question is the new conservation rules applicable to research rooms at A1 and A2 have caused a great deal of controversy and hampered access. Is this something that will be reviewed? Thank you for your comment. Yes, we can certainly review it. I have nothing else waiting in the chat queue. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Okay, we're going to wrap up today's webinar. Please continue the conversation on History Hub or you can email directly at opengov at narah.gov. We'd also like to hear your thoughts on this webinar format and how it went for you. Was it useful to have this conversation or are there other formats you would prefer? David, do you have any final words for us as we wrap up today's webinar? Can we unmute the archivist? It appears he dropped off the line. Oh, no. So we were going to have some closing remarks, so thanks, everyone, for joining us. And we'll be sure to try to repeat this process if it was helpful in the future. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, everyone.