 Welcome, and thank you for joining the NARA's new process for posting and commenting on proposed records, schedules, and public webinar. Before we begin, please ensure that you have opened the WebEx participant and chat panels by using the associated icons located at the bottom of your screen. Note that all audio connections are muted at this time. To submit a question, select all panelists from the drop-down menu in the chat panel and enter your question in the message box provided and send. Alternatively, press Pound 2 on your telephone keypad. You will hear a notification when your line is unmuted. At that time, please then state your question. If you require technical assistance of any kind, please send a chat to the event producer. With that, I'll turn the conference over to Meg Phillips, External Affairs Liaison. Thank you. Welcome to our webinar in the National Archives and Records Administration's new process for posting and inviting public comment on proposed record schedules. Thanks for joining us today. As event services announced, I'm Meg Phillips, External Affairs Liaison for the National Archives and I'll be moderating today's program. Here's what we plan to do today. I'm going to briefly introduce our two speakers and then we'll spend maybe 20 or 25 minutes on explanation of the process and the change we just made. And then we expect to have about half an hour for questions and discussion. We're planning for just an hour for this webinar, but we can stay online beyond that time if there happens to be a lot of discussion. Okay, let me introduce our speakers today. Both of our guests are senior managers within agency services, which is the office at NARA that works closely with federal agencies on the management of their records. This is a pretty new thing for us, inviting the agency-facing staff to talk to the public instead of just relying on our public-facing research staff. But this is something that we've come to believe is really important. First, Lawrence Brewer is the chief records officer for the United States government. He leads a team of about 90 appraisal archivists, training specialists, a records management policy team, and NARA's oversight and inspections program. His office also sets records management policy for the entire federal government. Next, we have Margaret Hawkins, or Maggie. She's the director of records management operations within the office of the chief records officer, and she and her team are most directly in charge of managing the records scheduling and appraisal process that we're going to be talking about for the rest of the day today. So Lawrence and Maggie, would either of you like to say a few words of welcome before we get started? Yes, thank you, Meg. Really excited, can you tell, to have this opportunity to talk with all of you about the significant changes that we are making to our process for making available draft record schedules for your comments? Our intent with these changes is to make the process more open and transparent and more technologically progressive in how we are connecting with all of you. Maggie? Thanks, glad to be here today to discuss this change in the process. Thanks for dialing in, everyone. Okay, great. Our goals for today are to provide a bit of background on federal records management and the scheduling process itself. We want to explain why we changed the process for posting proposed schedules. Then we want to actually go through the new regulations.gov process to show you how it works in a little bit of detail. And finally, we'll talk about your role, the role of the public in the record scheduling process. So after Lawrence and Maggie cover the essential points from their point of view, we'll open up the phone lines for a general question and answer in discussion period. You can use the chat function in WebEx to send a question at any time a question occurs to you. So feel free to use that, but we're not going to open the phone lines until the Q&A period. So with that, let's get started with some background information just to sort of level set everyone's understanding of the broader process that the public comment process fits into. The first thing we want to do is show you a new video to help explain this process. And this video is actually part of NARA's new effort to better explain records management to the public and not just focus on explaining records management to agency staff and other records managers. Many of you may have already checked this video out since the link was in the webinar invitation, but it's only three minutes long and we want to make sure that everyone knows about it. So with that, can you cue the video, please? The federal government creates, stores, and maintains billions of records on a daily basis. Most people probably know that some of those records will one day become part of the permanent historical collections of the National Archives, detailing the actions and policies of the United States government, preserved right alongside the Charters of Freedom that outline the principles of how we govern this nation. But who decides which of these records are actually worth saving and for how long? Who decides, for example, that we should keep a World War II veteran's service record forever while disposing within three years boxes or hard drives full of supply requests or building maintenance files? Decisions about which records to retain and for how long are captured in a legal document we call a record schedule. Record schedules, signed by the archivist to the United States, authorize agencies to preserve records of historical value or to destroy, after a specified period, records lacking continuing administrative, legal, research, or other value. Creating a record schedule takes not only collaboration between NARA and federal agencies, but also requires public review and comment. In this video, we'll demonstrate how you can comment by a regulations.gov on a proposed record schedule. Public participation is vital to the record scheduling process. Your comments contribute to the final decision about how long records are retained. The process begins when an agency submits a new schedule to the National Archives or requests revisions to an existing schedule. After submission, archivists conduct a thorough review of the draft schedule. They consider how long the records should be retained in support of an agency's mission and help determine whether the records should eventually be permanently retained at the National Archives. Once a draft schedule has been reviewed by NARA archivists, it's ready for that important step. Public comment. Through the federal register, the National Archives publishes notices that draft schedules are ready for public comment on regulations.gov. The regulations.gov site allows individuals to review draft schedules and submit specific recommendations for changes. Once the comment period closes, the comments and recommendations are reviewed by the appraisal archivist who consults with the agency about potential changes. In rare cases, a schedule is returned to the agency without action so that the agency can reconsider its proposal. A final draft of the schedule is reviewed by the chief records officer and other National Archives managers prior to being submitted to the archivist to the United States for approval. The archivist's approval follows a thorough consideration of the records use by the creating agency, the rights of the government, the rights of people directly affected by the government's activities, and the historical value of the records. The National Archives values public review and comment on agency records schedules through regulations.gov. We'd like to thank you in advance for being an active part of the National Archives mission and for helping us in our efforts to provide public access to federal government records. Thank you. So that video is now available on NARA's YouTube channel, and it's linked from our records management blog, Records Express. So it's going to remain available for commenters in the future as kind of a reference to how this process works. All right, so the video covers the basics of record scheduling and commenting. But I'd like to spend a few more minutes talking about how the record scheduling process works in some detail. So Maggie, I wonder what else we need to know. Great, thanks. I'd like to expand a bit on why the government schedules records. The goal of scheduling records is to provide instructions for what happens to records when agencies no longer need them for current government business. When an agency no longer needs the records for daily operations, how many more years does the agency need to maintain those records to provide for fiscal and legal considerations? How many additional years are needed to protect the rights and interests of those affected by government actions? And ultimately, do the records warrant continued preservation by the National Archives as permanent records under our appraisal policy? These are the types of questions agencies consider when they draft schedules and that NARA considers when we review the schedules. OK, so what happens after the agency drafts a record schedule and submits it to NARA? What does NARA do with it next? Well, it's really important to understand that this is a collaborative process between NARA and the agencies. NARA may answer any number of agency questions or review drafts of schedules even before they are formally submitted. Once submitted, other NARA archivists who prepare and describe archival records and provide reference services analyze the proposed schedule. They consider the context of other archival holdings and potential reference use. NARA often also conducts onsite appraisal meetings with agency staff to physically review the records, talk about the underlying business processes, and discuss the rationale behind the proposed retention period. This first part of the process could take a few months for more routine records or many months for more complex record schedules. OK, so after the appraisal archivists work with the agency that created the records and also with other archivists within the National Archives, what happens next? Well, after that's done, this work leads to the appraisal report that is posted with the proposed schedules on regulations.gov. It represents a distillation of the information learned during the appraisal process. The appraisal report is meant to be read in close conjunction with the proposed schedule. The report includes the appraiser's recommendation for the schedule, which is typically approval of the schedule, because if a schedule has actually made it this far, it means that we have worked with the agency to resolve any issues we identified earlier in the process. We may also have required one to several rounds of revision of the initial proposed schedule. After all that's done, we post the schedule for public comment, which represents another important part of the process. Once the comment period is closed, we review the comments and decide whether to revise the schedule, return the schedule and its entirety to the agency, or send it to the archivist for approval. Ultimately, when all is said and done, the Archivists of the United States has the responsibility and authority to determine the retention and disposition of federal records as specified in the Federal Records Act. However, in getting to that decision, the archivist relies on the input of numerous individuals of the agency, NARA, and the public. The schedule is not approved until public comments are adjudicated and the archivist signs off. Okay, so that sounds like a good description of the stable part of the process. That's how records management and records scheduling work under the Federal Records Act. But the reason that we're having this webinar today is that something just changed. And now I wonder if we can talk about what was it that changed and what we need to know about the mechanism for public comment. So I'll take that one, Meg. So for decades, our process for responding to public requests for schedules and then receiving and replying to comments on those schedules was carried out primarily via email. We would occasionally receive letters, sometimes postcards, but mostly our interaction with you, the public, has been by email. And you had to write us to request schedules in order to see the full content of the schedule that was being proposed. So we made the decision to leap into the 21st century. So now after more than a year of dedicated effort to identify our requirements and possible solutions, we launched our new web-based platform on regulations.gov in March of this year. Because of the new approach, we wanted to talk with you about what the changes mean for you, the commenting public, and why we in our belief these changes are important. There are several reasons why we're making the changes now. First, the archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, is committed to making sure we are as open and transparent as possible with our processes and our interactions with the public. And second, we want to provide a platform for engaging with all of you that is modern and technologically progressive within the constraints of our requirements. We recognize that you, the public, and our customers expect this from us. So could you tell us about some of the benefits of doing it in regulations.gov, doing it the new way? Absolutely. So Maggie will show you some of the benefits in a bit. But among them, more generally, is that there will be almost immediate online access to proposed schedules and appraisal reports without you having to ask with them by email. You will be able to comment online and also see other people's comments on particular schedules. Another important benefit of using regulations.gov is that it is a government-wide solution, specifically for the purpose of providing access to federal regulatory content. This helps reduce costs across the government while ensuring a consistent and reliable way for interacting with the public and stakeholders and avoids power having to reinvent the wheel. Okay, great. At this point, I think it would be most helpful for people who haven't actually used this process yet. For one of you to take us through what the new process looks like in regulations.gov. And also to talk a little bit about the relationship between regulations.gov and the federal register. Can one of you do that, Maggie? Yes, let's take a quick tour of the basics. Let's start with looking at how you would go about finding a schedule and making comments on it. Finding a schedule begins with the federal register, which is the daily journal of the United States government. NARA publishes notice of proposed schedules typically every two weeks. Schedules are posted for comment in batches of generally 60 to 40, although usually they number around about a dozen. They're batched together on an as-ready-to-go basis, meaning the schedules generally do not have any relationship to each other based on agency or type of record. Instead, their common thread is that they have reached the public comment stage of the process. So the best way to know that NARA has posted new schedules for comment is to sign up for alerts on the federal register. You can sign up for alerts for all posted NARA documents regardless of topic. Or perhaps you'd like to hone in on just proposed record schedules. If that is the case, use the advanced search function shown on the screen in conjunction with alerts by typing in the keyword record schedules. On the page that shows your search results, select the subscribe button that you can see highlighted with the red arrow at the top. After that, you should receive an email when NARA propose record schedules on the federal register. Then once you're on the federal register page with a notice for schedules, you can link directly to regulations.gov to view the proposed schedules and comment on them. To do that, you simply click on the docket number on the bottom right-hand corner of the page. So now you are on regulations.gov and can view and comment on the schedules listed in the notice. Viewing a schedule just takes a couple of clicks. Select the schedule title, then select the PDF icon to view the document. Just so people are aware, the PDF downloads functions differently in different browsers. If you have any problems with it, I recommend using the site's help menu. If you have any problem accessing any documents or just comment in general. Okay, let me interrupt for a second. What is actually on this PDF that people will be downloading? What will they see once they open it? Great, once you have a PDF, you'll be able to read through NARA's appraisal memo. It includes background about the records under review. It may also contain background about the organization scheduling the records. There's generally an item by item review, including additional information and context for each schedule item. This also includes an assessment of value based on our understanding of which records get used once they're in the archives. And that is taken in conjunction with whatever the records might be created by the agency that better document important functions. After the appraisal memo written by NARA, you'll see the proposed schedule itself. This is the document that is under review and, if approved, will govern the retention of the records that the agency. Ascension, the view is under slightly more watch taking issue for the DC Metropolitan Area. All employees and visitors should use culture when outbacked. It is recommended that all employees and guests remain indoors with their swarms packed. All employees and visitors outside should come inside with the first notice. If weather conditions change, we will provide further guidance. Thanks. So I assume everyone could hear that. Oh, you're getting a glimpse of real life in College Park, Maryland, wherever you are. So I apologize for that interruption, but I think we are safely indoors and we should be able to continue. That's right. In fact, we're obligated to stay indoors according to this. So, okay, turning back to the slide, you can see the deadline for submitting comments appears under the comment now button. The deadline also appears on the Federal Register notice. In order to have your comments considered, be sure to get your comments in before the deadline and submit the comments using the site. Comments that are sent after the deadline or directly to the agency managing the records are not considered during the review. After reading through the proposed schedule and related memorandums, select the comment now button to see the comment form. It's pretty self-explanatory. Yeah, so that just looks like a big open free text field. So you can in theory type whatever you want into that box, but really what we want is really usable comments. So is there any way people can get a sense of what makes a really good comment? Let me draw your attention to the very useful thing regulations.gov provides, which is the commenters checklist, which you can see the red arrows pointing to it. So with the commenters checklist, regulations.gov provides a helpful list of things to keep in mind when commenting on the schedule or any other document for that matter on regulations.gov. As they note it's important to first and foremost understand the document you are commenting on. So besides reading through it and thinking about it, if you have any questions that really need to be answered to comment on the document, you can email your questions to request.schedule.nar.gov and that email address is found in the federal register notice and on regulations.gov on the dockets. Also make sure to try to allow plenty of time before the deadline to answer any questions. Also, it's really helpful if you clearly communicate your recommendations for the record schedule. When commenting on a specific schedule, it is helpful to comment on specific items by item number and title. If you are recommending a change in the proposed retention, then also state why the change is needed and how long the record should be retained. So what kind of comments are really not helpful? Well, anyone can submit whatever comments they would like, but some comments are simply not actionable through this process. For instance, stating that an agency should not be allowed to destroy any records whatsoever is against the intent of the Federal Records Act and frankly it's just impractical for government agencies that create huge numbers of records. Even if the records are fully electronic, storage costs are really the tip of the iceberg of cost associated with preserving, accessing and migrating large volumes of records over lengthy periods of time. Retention decisions have to be made. Your input though helps us make the best possible decisions. We also receive a lot of comments that do not have anything to do with record schedules. For example, we get comments that recommend an agency be abolished. As a reminder, NAR does not tell other agencies how to perform their work or whether to even remain in business. So please only submit comments that are directly related to the retention of records in the proposed schedule. Sort of on that topic, I'd like to point out the last item on the summary checklist which quoting it says, one well-supported comment is often more influential than 1,000 form letters. Okay, so in other words, some comments just have a lot more impact on the actual final decision than other comments. Just out of curiosity, in your experience, do all schedules actually receive comments? No, not at all. In fact, most schedules do not receive any comments. Okay, so let's say a schedule gets at least one comment and maybe lots of comments. What's the next step? What happens next? We review and analyze the comments considering all of the factors relating to how long to retain the records. It can take anywhere from just a couple of weeks to several months to analyze and adjudicate comments. We may talk to the agency, we may consult with our general counsel or their legal counsel. Once we complete our analysis, we may recommend that the agency revise or withdraw the schedule. We may also decide that changes are not necessary and then recommend that the schedule proceed forward for approval. So when would NARA recommend that a proposed schedule be changed? Well, as I noted before, whether we receive a single comment or multiple comments, we look at them all very closely. For instance, we recently changed the schedule where we had just one comment coming in telling us that the disposition of the final decisions of a board of appeals was not clear. We added a permanent item to the schedule as a result of this comment to make it more clear. In other cases, we may change a retention period, making it longer if people cite specific reasons why records may need to be retained longer. And then how does the public find out what actually happened to the schedule that they commented on? So once we're done adjudicating all the comments, the archivist will approve the schedule or a decision is made to withdraw the schedule. We will then post a consolidated reply on regulations.gov associated with the original docket. We develop a consolidated reply that summarizes all the comments we received and explains what actions we were taking with the schedule. And if somebody's signed up to alert for a specific docket, once that consolidated reply is added, they will be notified that a document has been added to the docket. Okay, that was great Maggie, thank you. That was a good review of how the federal register and the regulations.gov process work for reviewing proposed schedules. Now I'd like to take a step back and talk about why this process in particular has a way for the public to comment. Why is that? Why does this process need public comment? So we recognize that there are many ways to view the value of records proposed on a schedule. This is where you, the public, come in. This process is really intended for agencies to request disposition authority for records they do not want to retain forever and that NAR does not want in the National Archives. Posting notice of proposed schedules for public comment is all about notifying people that the government wants permission to destroy records and offering the public the opportunity to share their views on what is specifically proposed on the schedules. There are a number of areas where public comments can be very helpful. They ensure that disposition instructions on proposed schedules are clear and appropriate for the records on the schedule. They help us identify significant research purposes for the records that we may not have considered and they help us ensure that the rights and interests of the public and other stakeholders are protected. Thank you, Maggie and Lawrence. That was a nice overview of records scheduling under the Federal Records Act, also what just changed in the transition to regulations.gov, why we moved to the new platform and also why public comments are so important. So our goal for the first half of this webinar was to give everyone some basic information about the new process and in the second half of the webinar, we'd like to open up the discussion to address questions and comments. So event services, could you please remind us how to ask a question? Absolutely. To submit a question, please select all panelists from the drop down menu in the chat panel and enter your question in the message box provided and send. Alternatively, press pound two on your telephone keypad and you will hear a notification when your line is unmuted. At that time, please then state your question. Once again, pound two will indicate that you wish to ask a question over the phone. Thank you very much. So we do have questions coming in through chat, so I'm just gonna start with some of these. James Jacobs has asked that, so comments do go to NARA as part of this commenting process and he asks if the agency in question is also involved in analyzing comments to propose schedules. So it would depend on what the comments are, whether or not an agency is involved. Sometimes we get comments that we may have actually considered during the appraisal process and there might be an answer already in the appraisal report or in other notes, et cetera, that we may have. So we may be able to just answer it without involving the agency. Anything that's fairly detailed and of a more substantive nature, we generally go back to the agency and consult with them. We've reconducted appraisal visits. As I mentioned earlier, we've met with agency's legal counsel, we've brought our own legal counsel into it. So I would say the more substantive and complex both the record schedule and the comments are it is more likely that we will involve the agency. What we don't do is we don't have the agency's interface with the commenters or write any of our material that is posted on regulations.gov or in the appraisal memo. Just to follow up here, the agency does find out about significant comments. Yes, the agency does find out about significant comments. In the past, when people were emailing us, we did not tell them who the commenters were. In this case, we would not either, they would need to go on to regulations.gov and look at it. Okay, thank you, Maggie. Okay, the next question is from Diane who asks if we could please explain how to receive updates on the docket, including an alert when we post a consolidated response. So what you would need to do there is if there was a particular schedule you were interested in, you would have to sign up for an alert for that particular schedule. And when anything is added to the docket, which is generally speaking going to be the consolidated response, you will get alert for that particular schedule. There's no way to do it sort of globally is my understanding, but just if you sign up for an alert for a particular schedule that you're interested in. Okay, thank you. Gavin asks, will NARA post all proposed record schedules on regulations.gov when they're noticed in the federal register? He notices that the May 8 and May 22 federal register notices seem to list more pending schedules than are currently posted in regulations.gov. And just to make sure that we cover something that I know our panelists also wanted to really talk about, could you also address just whether every proposed schedule ends up getting posted on the federal register? So that's kind of a multi-part question. So I guess I'll cover the general question that you added to Gavin's question, which is do all schedules get posted? And so the answer is no. The federal register process is really designed for posting records that are proposed for disposal to make sure that the public has an opportunity to weigh in on whether or not those records should be retained. So in those schedules that are posted, you may see as you're reviewing schedules series that are proposed for permanent retention. Those are all part of the schedule, so we don't split anything out. The public gets to see the full schedule as it was submitted. What the public may never see is if a schedule contains only permanent items on it, records that are proposed for retention in the National Archives. By law, we're not required to post those schedules for public comment. And really, when you think about it, the reason is we don't need really the opinion of the public on why we shouldn't keep the records. I think the idea is basically that the risk is much lower. We've already promised to keep those records, and we're assuming that nobody's going to object to things we want for the Archives. So going back to Gavin's question, he's pointing out that the Federal Register notices seem to list more pending schedules than are currently posted in regulations.gov. And I know that those things are not perfectly to the nanosecond in sync, and that could be one possible reason. So every schedule that's listed in the Federal Register should be on regulations.gov. So what I'm going to do when we're done with this is go look at May 8th and May 22nd and see if some problem occurred. There, just as a point of fact, there are three different systems that need to talk to each other to make this all work, and they're not always perfectly in sync and working. Generally speaking, it's been going fine, but we will definitely look into that. Were there to be any that were left off so we would repost them and restart the 45-day clock? So I was hoping that you would notice the thing about, or mention the thing about the three systems having to talk to each other. So it's not magic, but it's pretty quick, and they should all be there. So Gavin, if you happen to actually know a particular citation for something that didn't show up, we can look into it that much more quickly. Okay, the next question I see come in is, again from James Jacobs, what happens if an agency proposes that a type of record is of no value, but NARA, through the commenting process, decides that it does indeed have long-term value? So one of our things that an agency proposes is scheduled when we decide. This is a typical thing that might happen, and it can happen in reverse as well. So we agencies propose, we look into it, and then ultimately it's NARA's decision if we decide something has long-term value, either a longer retention period or it's a permanent record that needs to come to the National Archives as an accession record, our, the archivist's decision on that is what prevails. I just wanted to add that the process that we have by which we do appraisal work with the agencies and review comments is not in any way a perfunctory process. I mean, there's certainly no presumption that if an agency submits a schedule, it's going to be approved as submitted and agencies are fully aware of that. We certainly, and I know it's been said in places that we on occasion have been known to or perceived to be rubber stamping schedules when they come in. And I can assure you that Maggie and her team of appraisal supervisors and team members are very diligent in making sure that we are reviewing each series as it comes through. And as Maggie correctly said, we ultimately decide on behalf of the people what gets retained in the archives and what doesn't. Thank you. Okay. We have skipped over a question and I'm going back to it now. Chad Doner asks, could the panelists address in greater detail the reason why the storage cost of electronic records is just the tip of the iceberg of the cost involved in permanent preservation of electronic records? He also asks, how did the total cost of preserving electronic records compare with those paper textual records? So this is a good question and a discussion that I know we've had many, many times over and I guess I'll start and see if Mag or Maggie went away in. But essentially, you know, the way Maggie described it in her presentation is the storage is just the tip of the iceberg. If you're just talking about the cost to store the records on media, that is a very narrowly focused view of the overall cost of maintaining records. So there's certainly costs related to the management of those records over the long term, accessing the records, being able to search and retrieve records for purposes of FOIA, all those costs, including the preservation over the long period of time, all those costs rise exponentially when you are keeping them for a very long period of time. And for example, if you have to do a search for FOIA, then you're now searching through much, much, much more information in order to find what is responsive to that FOIA request. So what we preach and what we talk about with agencies is that we need to work with them to understand their business processes, how the records fit within those business processes, and ensure that the schedules protect the records for only as long as they are needed for the business of the agency and to make sure that the rights of the citizens and the public are protected. So a lot of research goes into the decisions that are made about how the records are retained, and we do want to make sure that as good records managers and stewards of the information of the people that we are doing our best to support efficient and effective government. I'd like to add, I mentioned that in my part of the presentation specifically because I do sense a lot of frustration on people's part that because records are electronic, they wish they could all be permanent or all be kept for very long periods of time so they could have access to them with often the comment that simply because they're electronic, they should all be permanent or they should be kept longer without kind of thinking about that larger context of the cost, et cetera. And then you also asked about the cost of textual versus electronic. I don't have any figures at my fingertips. I think it's the sort of thing that's fairly well documented in archival literature. I think there's a lot of cost estimates out there and the costs are pretty staggering for electronic records. And this is Meg. I mean, you seem to be asking specifically about sort of digital preservation of electronic records. And the mere storage of those bit streams as we receive them from the agency is not as intimidating as the cost of developing the digital preservation systems that allow us to migrate records to new formats if necessary and make sure that we're maintaining good usable records hundreds of years into the future at the archive. So we have a staff at the National Archives not facing the agencies, but facing, you know, the researchers and building our own infrastructure that is working on pretty complicated projects to make sure that we're able to do that into the future. So we try to understand the commitment that we're making when we take in less. Well, so it is a very good question. Okay, we've got some more questions coming in. Sarah, thanks you for providing this overview and says that she's curious to know what's considered archival use. Do you consider legal uses for the documents like future lawsuits against agency actions? So by archival use, we're talking more about, you know, do they warrant permanent preservation? And specifically in terms of legal use, we, for permanent records, we're looking for more what we consider what we call enduring legal use, which would mean legal issues that would not go away or diminish with the passage of time. Those are fairly rare. It might be legal land records or something that may fit into that category. One of the things we wouldn't necessarily do is think about how someone might sue over some issue at some point in the future. That gets into the realm of being somewhat hypothetical if we're talking about any type of lawsuit. We do look at, I mentioned having our general counsel and legal counsel agencies, they may look at records and determine retention periods based on the potential for what somebody's legal claim might be allowable under tort law and things like that. And we do often factor those in for the retention periods. Let me ask you about, you know, temporary retention periods. Does that necessarily mean that things are thrown away right away? So for temporary, very rarely are things thrown out right away. We, you know, it's usually typically anywhere from three to 75 years, depending on the record. I also wanted to point out with the legal issue that we also take into consideration statutes of limitations are considered when we are thinking about how long to keep temporary records. Yeah, no, that's great information. And one of the things that I think when people who aren't living with this process every day hear temporary and permanent, they really see it as a black and white sort of situation when in fact we have temporary records that are kept for a really, really long time. So we're really just trying to make that determination about whether it belongs in the archives forever. So I also just wanted to add, because we haven't mentioned it yet, but when we're talking about, you know, what we're doing in terms of looking at the value of the records, temporary or permanent, but primarily permanent, we have a document that's available publicly on our website, which is the appraisal policy of the National Archives. You could probably Google it. And I would try NARA 1441 and appraisal policy of the National Archives. And it does go through sort of the approach and the foundation by which our appraisers rely on to review and analyze schedules and determine whether something that's appropriately scheduled is permanent or not. And also I'd like to add that when we're considering retention periods agencies are expected to consult with their general counsel to help flesh out any reasons the records might be needed in litigation, either by the agency or citizen suing as well. So while agencies may not run all the record schedules by their legal counsel, some agencies do, not all of them do, but in anything that, one, the program people who work on the records may be aware that they could fall into that category. They are expected to discuss it with their own legal counsel. Before submitting the schedule. Okay, great. Okay, next question. James is asking a follow-up question, I think. Well, I understand that schedules with no proposed disposition or destruction, in other words permanent schedules, wouldn't need to be commented on. It would still be interesting if there was some way that the public was aware of those proposed schedules as well. So it's sort of a comment. I'm going to piggyback a question on top of that comment, because how can the public find out what schedules are in effect? Is there a way that they can get access to the approved schedules that agencies are really using to decide when to throw away their record? Yes, so we have all the schedules are posted online at archives.gov, and those can be found either by going to the records management page, or it's called Records Control Schedule Repository, and there's a link right up there at the top of the page. You can also do my favorite thing, which is just Google it. There aren't a bunch of records control schedule repositories out there, so if you Google that, it'll pop it right up there. And then there under its range by agency, we use records groups, which are generally assigned at the agency level, sometimes several per agency, but you can pretty easily surf through there and look at them, or if there's a specific agency you're interested in, they're arranged in a reverse chronological order, so you'd be able to look at them that way. Okay, great. I have a request for our helpers, which is that, yes, thank you. So Yesel Ion, I think, asks, what are the sampling methods used by NARA appraisal archivists and respective agencies to determine disposition for record groups that are too large for individuals to read over one by one? So for example, electronic records such as interagency email. So I'm going to kind of distill this down to ask about sampling for really voluminous records. This is something that we do. No, I'm taking this question to be when we're conducting appraisal reviews at the agencies to determine the disposition. And what I would say there is I don't think we've ever encountered a series of records where we can read it over quote unquote one by one. Any group of records created by the federal government tend to be quite large, quite voluminous. So what we do is it depends on the agencies of records when we meet with agencies and see samples, it can be anywhere from a handful to a fairly large amount depending on what the records are. And also a lot depends on if something falls into what we call the gray area, which is records that are not clearly temporary or not clearly permanent. Certain things are going to be clearly permanent. We always use Department of State cables as an example. Clearly permanent, no one has ever disputed that the substantive program cables from the Department of State are permanent. But a lot of other things might fall into a gray area and those we would look at a much larger sample. Can I actually make a guess about something that might be useful here as well? And again I may just not be interpreting the question right, but the actual volume of the record series itself is not as important as getting a clear description of the series of records so that the disposition applies to a category of records and then the agency can keep adding records within that category and the retention decision or the appraisal would still apply. An example here of a voluminous record series would be email, but you can make a decision about how long emails created by a certain person or at a certain level in an agency need to be kept. It doesn't really matter how many emails are in there, you're making a decision based on the importance of the function and that decision remains in place even as additional emails or the collection of emails grow and many series are like that. So they're very voluminous series of records, but we're operating at the level of a description of the group rather than individual records. Okay, next question. You have a sense of what portion of agency records are scheduled and what portion are not managed by an approved schedule. I imagine this varies from agency to agency. I don't know, Elliot, but I'm guessing that this is somebody knowledgeable about records management. This is a good question. So what portion of agency records are scheduled? So I guess I'll start and I'll start by saying I don't have any precise figures that have my fingertips, but I think one of the things that we've learned in working with agencies is that records that have permanent value or are important for rights and interests and protecting those rights and interests are generally well managed, documented and scheduled within agencies. And I say that generally. And then of course all agencies have at their disposal the general record schedules which covers a large portion of records that are common to all agencies. So what an agency needs to really focus on in looking at all of their business processes and records are everything else. So they typically will know depending upon the agency, what their core businesses are, what their mission is, and it's fairly, I won't say it's easy, but it becomes a little bit more obvious when you look at it from that macro level what records need to be scheduled to support those processes. And then the administrative records are the ones that we deal with every day that can be covered by NARA's general record schedule. So I don't know what the portion is and obviously it does depend agency to agency. Every agency is not equally resourced to do records management which includes record scheduling and appraisal. Certainly our expectation at NARA is that all records get scheduled and we do work closely with all agencies to ensure that they do and provide the support that they need. So that is the expectation. The one thing that I will point out is that records that are not scheduled if for example an agency has not gotten around to a series of records or if they newly created series of records those are treated as de facto permanent records because they are not covered by a schedule which means they cannot be destroyed until they have an appropriate disposition authority connected to them. That was great. So just for the audience the general record schedules are also available on our website and so these are things that are common to virtually every agency like your travel records and your personnel records Yes. They are all on the website. They are voluminous both in terms of the schedules themselves and the records they cover but there is quite a bit of detail on our website about them. So kind of following off that last question all of these proposed schedules that are coming in and that the public is notified about through the Federal Register like why is the agency submitting those schedules? In some cases might they reschedule records that have already been scheduled or are these brand new functions like what's going on in the agency that's generating these schedules? So what's the range of things that might be going on in an agency? So an agency may be scheduling records because they have a new function or that's just completely newly created or they may have inherited a function from a different agency and are in the process of rescheduling the records they may also be consolidating items into what we call larger aggregations because those are easier to implement particular environments. I think those are some of the classic reasons someone may reschedule. Okay we have another question that came in through chat. Sometimes a pending schedule proposes changing the status of an existing NARA accession collection from permanent to temporary. What drives such re-evaluation? Is it lack of storage space? What you're referring to are what we kind of colloquially refer to as internal disposals. So those are different numbers on them and they're easily recognizable by that. They start with an N2 so we call them N2 jobs internally. So this is where NARA looks at records that as you know are already accessioned and says we would like to de-accession them which generally means withdrawing them. Occasionally the agency will take them back or they will end up being donated somewhere depending on records. And I would say generally these are not, well I would say it's not driven by storage space and lack of storage space. In fact if you read some of them that are up there the volumes actually typically are fairly small. Occasionally there's one with a large amount of volume. It's more that we've had a chance to live with the records, they're in our custody, we know what they are we've had it, there's been a good chance for any reference used to reveal itself, those types of things and after considered decision and internal schedules go through a lot of review internally we've determined that we really just don't think they're permanent any longer that either a mistake was made in bringing in various points in our history we've had big sort of pushes to bring in large volumes of permanent records when National Archives was first built for instance back in the 30s and then at various points when we were building Archives 2 and moving things out of the Washington National Records Center and once the death settles on all that eventually people realize that sometimes records just were not, the best choices weren't made and under our current appraisal policy 1441 they just would not rise to level being permanent. I would just like to quickly add that what Maggie is talking about in terms of internal disposal my understanding and you guys can correct me if I wrong is not unique to NAR. This is part of what Archives all over the world do as a way of maintaining a healthy modern, properly functioning Archives. We all need to do it at home with our own records and it's just something that we spend a lot of time and attention and make sure there's a significant amount of review and consideration before such an internal disposal is put forward and approved but it's something that is common to all Archives that I'm aware of. Again just for the sake of the audience I think in general when we appraise records as permanent we genuinely want the records covered by that schedule item but sometimes what's transferred is not as good as we hoped or whatever so it's not like we're shedding records out of the Archives that's not generally something that happens a lot but we need the option of deaccessioning things that are turning out not to be as valuable as we had thought they would be. May I ask event services if there have been any questions coming in on the phone? We have no questions in queue at this time. We were speculating about whether people would prefer chat. They usually seem to. I do not have any more questions unless if our helpers can point it out if I've missed any altogether so we're coming up to the end of our time I do want to ask one more question Maggie and Lawrence may curse me for this but I want to ask if this record scheduling process under the Federal Records Act covers all records created anywhere in the federal government. I'll start with that one. It's a good question. I'm glad we're able to close on this one just to make sure everyone is sort of clear what our role is when we're working on schedules. The answer is no. The records of the President, are covered by a different law the Presidential Records Act or the PRA. With just a few exceptions all of those records are permanent and do come to the legal custody of the National Archives at the end of the administration. Congress and the Supreme Court are actually not covered by a record keeping law but both transfer records are regularly according to mutual agreements. Different processes. We've been talking about 55 minutes of our hour today. That is kind of the default position for the majority of the government. Is that true? Yes. Okay. So if there are no more it looks like I might be getting one more question. It was a thank you. Thank you James. Thanks Lawrence, Maggie and Meg I appreciate that. Okay, so we are coming right up to 3 o'clock and because luckily we've run out of questions at the same time we ran out of time we're going to wrap things up. I'd like to close by thanking all of you for connecting and participating with us. We'd be really happy to address any additional questions you have. The best place to send questions about the scheduling process or regulations.gov is request.schedule at nara.gov. And Maggie and her staff will monitor that email address and get back to you. They are the true experts in this process. The best place to send questions or comments about the value of webinars like this or other outreach activities is to me since my role is improving the way NARA communicates with the community. And my email address is up on the last slide. It's meg.philips with 2L at nara.gov. We're not able to get to now or that you send in after the end of this webinar. We can do our best to address them in a follow-up blog post that we're planning on the records management blog of the National Archives Records Express. With that Lawrence, Maggie and I I'll thank you again for your interest in this process. Have a wonderful afternoon. Thanks so much everyone. That concludes our conference. Thank you for using AT&T event conferencing enhanced.