 Good morning. It is 10 o'clock so we'll go ahead and get started. Welcome to the June bimonthly records and information discussion group. Although the weather is pretty gloomy outside and wet and we know traffic and transportation getting here was a little difficult this morning but we welcome you all and thank you all for coming. My name is Gordon Everett. I'm the Director of Custom Relationship Management for the Federal Records Center Program and we'll have a full agenda for you today and for those on YouTube who are watching us via YouTube, at any time you can ask questions during this presentation by hitting us with questions via the YouTube platform or for those in the room we will be able to take questions here within the auditorium. So as for our agenda today, we'll have an update on the NARA reporting period and highlights by Don Rosen. Let me switch over to that slide. We'll have a blockchain white paper review with Eric Douglass, Eric's records management policy and program support office of the Chief Records Officer. We'll preview the 2020 annual move with Derek Kennedy from the permanent records capture team. He's also out of the office of the Chief Records Officer. Planning your records and management training, Gary Rousfus, who's our Director of Records Management Training. And then we'll have Steve Arreda who will update us on the Federal Records Center's disposal update. Steve will bring information on that. Steve will be calling in with that information and then we'll wrap up at the end. For those who are attending the afternoon session from 1 to 3 in the Washington Room, I think we're doing the, let's see, Appraisal Archivist Team 1 with the Federal Account Managers will meet in the Washington Room at 1 o'clock. So without further ado, we'll get started. And we'll have Don Rosen kick us off. Good morning, everyone. All right. So I just wanted to take a few minutes to update everyone on the annual reporting. As everyone knows, we got a late start this year because of the shutdown. And I think we gave you a little bit of a more of a compressed schedule to running it from March to April. But we're done with the reporting. Everyone's reports are in and now we're working on the consolidating, getting the final report ready. So I want to give you a status where we are with all that as we move forward to wrapping up the reporting period. So just a reminder of what we did ask everyone to do those who are not familiar with the reporting period. We asked you to do the Records Management Self-Assessment and provide us your feedback there. We did our email management maturity model again. And of course we had our senior agency official report for records management where we asked those high-level questions about what's going with your program, wanting the information from the SAOs, looking goals towards 2019, how you're meeting that requirement and other high-level requirements. So we gave you three things to fill out. I think we had 259 agencies did the RMSA and over 100 submitted SEO reports. Consistent what we've done in years past. So the good news is response rate more ended up being outstanding. So I want to thank everyone for that. Given where we were with the shutdown and the compressed schedules, I know it was a lot we asked. But thank you very much. For the SEO reports context, we have 94 percent we received, which was great. 96 percent of agency submitted the Records Management Self-Assessment, then 95 percent for email maturity model. All consistent with what we had in the last few years. There's a few we're still working with. But overall, excellent response rates. So thank you to everyone for all the hard work getting it in. And we're very much appreciative. And also thanks to our staff for working with you. We're really very appreciative that we had such good rates. And that really helps us to have that information. So what are we doing with the report? So as you know, we do post the SEO RMS reports. I believe we actually have all of those posted right now. And that's the link to it there to take a look at those. So if you want to see what other agencies are doing, I encourage you to look at those SEO reports. Lots of good information in them. We're reviewing them. But we're posting the PDFs. We're also going to be posting those email management maturity model results for your agent results. We do summarize those scores in the actual summarized report we're going to do. So the team is busy getting those reports done. We've downloaded all the data that we get out of Qualtracks, which is the tool that you submitted the responses. So we're analyzing that. Senior team are doing that. That'll take us some time to pull all that out and summarize the trends. What are we seeing? I've started to see some initial data for that. But I'll have come back and hopefully in August and do that deep dive, which I've done in years past. And I'll walk you through each section of the RMSA and the SEO reports and email and show you what we found. So look forward to that too. So we're going to summarize the data. Then we'll put it into, we call that farm report, which will summarize all three reports. I'll put them into one. And then we share that report with Congress to those committees that follow our work. We post it to the web page, special interest groups follow it. We normally get interest from the press. And of course, we send it to all of you to take a look at as we're done. So we're working through that process. And I think we're actually kind of on target to have where we were in years past to have that report out sometime in late summer. So kind of the next steps, we do have to finish that data analysis. And then we're going to publish the report, share, you know, the statistics, and then also start planning for for 2019. That's going to be a big year for us. Because that'll be the year that's directive goal passes. So how did agencies do in being that 2019. So we're going to start looking at all that. Just in addition, how we're using the data in addition to sharing with you, we'll look at that data for make sure things are consistent in uniform manner. We hopefully will identify any emerging trends that we see. And then hopefully provides feedback to you and helps us making any guidance and training decisions as well. So we do use all the data that you send us. And hopefully for you to use the data to like, you know, you see any weaknesses in your program. That's what it's for. If you knew where you might want to apply your resources. So hopefully that the information from the reporting is valuable to you as it is to us. So look for more information in the next few months about what we do for planning for next year. So in addition, as we wrap up the 2018 report, we are going to pivot to 2019. But hopefully, we don't have any more shutdowns and things like that. And we'll be on a normal target where we were in past years, likely having the reporting period early in January of 2020 to report on where we are in 2019. But more of that to come later into the fall. But for the summer, we'll get through reporting. So that's where we are right now. It's going to be a busy summer for the team as they analyze all the data, get the report ready and published and out to everybody. So with that, I'd be happy to take any questions about reporting. Any other questions you might even have about the oversight program? Questions? No? All right. Well, I will be back in August to give you guys a deeper dive into everything that we've been collecting. So with that, I'll turn it over to Kyle Douglas. More than everyone. So hopefully, everyone had their coffee. We're going to talk about blockchain today. By so hands, how many of you heard of blockchain or, okay, that's a good amount here. So I'll be providing you a presentation on blockchain. I'll be giving you a technical overview, and then I'll get into some more of the records management specific things. So with the agenda, let's see here. Okay, we're going to go over a background and talk about how we got started in this presentation. I'm sorry, this research. I'll give you some overview. I'll talk about some of the things that's going on in the federal government with respect to blockchain. I'll talk about the records management implications for us and some of the archival implications, and I'll wrap up and take some questions. So the project was part of a FY18 initiative to research blockchain specifically within the records management space. We reviewed and analyzed sources to identify the potential impact for records management. We attended meetings, conferences, and done a lot of research and read a lot of articles about blockchain with some of the more prevalent thinkers in this field. Our goal was to provide a better understanding of technology and communicate that to our audience, our stakeholders, which are you. So who can you trust? So when we talk about blockchain, and we get a little bit into the technical side, so sometimes it takes a couple of times to explain. So the best way we thought was to kind of give you a conceptual view. So when you deposit a sum of money into a bank institution, you trust that some will be there until you decide to spend that money. You trust the bank will have an accurate record of that transaction, such as the amount and the date and time of that purchase. Most of us don't even think about the trust that we place in the banks when we do this. More broadly, societies come to rely on centralized repositories, such as banks and governments to collect, maintain, and protect the records actions of individuals and institutions. These trusted third parties are woven into our daily lives, such as on electrical devices. You'll see a UL stamp, which stands for underwriter laboratories, which lets you know that that device has been tested and is safe to use. On this next slide, there's other examples, you know, what you trust in brokers when you purchase houses and other things such as talking about with the musical, buying musical online. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer network that enables two parties in transact business. The blockchain network uses a centralized, I'm sorry, uses a decentralized worker keeping consensus or trust-based transactions in this tamper resistant. Blockchains have three parts. They contain a list of transactions over a period of time, and transactions can represent any type of activity, such as registering a land deed to a single purchase. I'll get to what that means to you in a second. But the maximum number of transactions on a blockchain or on a network can be up to one megabyte. The chain is created when the hash value of one block is inserted into the next block. This makes a link between the new block and the previous block, which takes a little bit more, and we'll talk a little bit more about hashes and values in a few minutes. Oftentimes, to save space, multiple hash values can be brought together and hashed again, thus creating a single hash value that represents multiple hashes, and this technology is called a merkle tree. However, on the network, the network infrastructure contains the complete record of all the transactions on a blockchain. The centralized network, most of us have in our daily experiences using intranets or in our organizations. Data is generally stored there, and that's where everyone goes to that one place to retrieve information. With distributed networks, such as blockchains, they retain the information in multiple locations. That is just one. Let's talk about what is a hash. I got into this a little bit earlier. Large amounts of data are often stored off-chain with pointers or hashes of the data stored within the blockchain. A hash is an algorithm, basically. That takes a variable string of data, such as you see on column or row one, National Archives, that's the variable string, and it creates a fixed length value. The hash is unique, and if the data is altered, the resulting hash should have a different output. Here we've generated an example using National Archives as a string, and as you can see, slight alterations generate different hashes. So in the first row, you'll see National Space Archives, and you'll see the hash value to the right of that. In the second column, or the second row, you'll see there's a space, an extra space, and you see how the hash value has changed. Look at the first four digits, D926, whereas the previous one is 6429. So that's how the hash changes. And in the last row, you'll see National Archives with a zero, and the hash is now F52. So this is what we mean by a hash value will change if there's a difference in the input. The network infrastructure contains the complete record of all the transactions on a blockchain. There are three types of networks. The public networks allows anyone to participate, and the permission network allows certain parties to participate, while private networks is usually established between trusted entities. I think a lot of us heard about Bitcoin about now, but there are many different types of blockchain platforms, and we've highlighted three here to illustrate the differences among them, or some of the differences. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency or digital currency with a related open-source platform. Bitcoin blockchain is primarily designed to support the exchange of cryptocurrency without an intermediary third party. Bitcoin is assumed no trust between parties and requires numerous decentralized nodes to ensure the blockchain has not been corrupted by malicious code. Whereas Bitcoin is primarily focused on the trade of its own currency, Ethereum provides an open-source programming language allowing users to build applications with integrated blockchain. Users can program smart contracts using the blockchain. We'll talk a little bit more about smart contracts later on in this presentation. However, Ethereum also has a cryptocurrency named Ether. Last in our example is Hyperledger. Hyperledger project focuses on developing an open-source and collaborative approach to distributed ledgers. By developing standards in an overall framework for blockchains, Hyperledger is gaining support from corporations such as, we'll just say corporations, and it's taught by some in library information science schools. All right, now we talked about smart contracts. Let's jump a little bit more into that. A smart contract is a series of Ethereum statements programmed and saved on the blockchain. If you remember some of these old DOS windows, you have a programmer who typically types up their open-source code. So in an example, when you, say for example, you buy music offline, you know, you can, what will happen is you will have, you can program, if it was on a blockchain, that sale was on a blockchain, you could program if that user pays this amount of money or X amount of money, then that what will happen is we'll execute a contract to release or provide access to that music to that purchaser. So again, it's a series of if-then statements and once the requirements of the smart contract are met, the contract will automatically be executed and the resultant action will be stored and shared across the blockchain, meaning once that purchase takes place, everyone on the network will see that purchase took place. So what's going on in federal government with respect to blockchain? GSA has begun a forum for blockchain and at this time federal agencies and state governments are exploring and adopting this different initiatives for services. You can see some of these initiatives on the GSA's U.S. Emergent Citizen Technology Atlas. Another point worth mentioning is that the future for blockchain looks promising at its garner congressional focus with the commission of the congressional blockchain caucus. All right, so let's talk about the records management implications. We got past some of the technical things. So what does this mean for us? So the term record information includes all traditional forms of records regardless of physical form or characteristics, including information created, manipulated, and communicated and stored in digital or electronic format. The hash of a blockchain, the block header, and the transactional data could be federal records. What does this mean? How can it be federal record? Essentially, if the records or the transactions that are made in connection with the transactional government business with the public and are preserved or because of the information value, they are essentially federal records. The records within the blocks may consist of a variety of record types accumulated from most shared books, all subscribing nodes. That's kind of a declarative statement. All right. There are multiple records management requirements for federal records, considering the preservation of their authenticity integrity. The main takeaway here is that blockchains distribute its records, hence the term distributed ledger. Any tampering will be identifiable and can theoretically be resolved. Of course, there are some system rules involved, but essentially this is a new way for ensuring the integrity in the records management landscape when considering blockchain. A little bit out of order here. There we go. There's been discussion surrounding the scheduling of blockchain records and the need for narrative-produced policy early enough in technology's developmental stages. With that said, our rationale or flow of logic began with the fact that we've established that record materials are created on blockchains and reside in the hash or the metadata and are offline within the platform. We understand that records within the blocks may consist of a already record types accumulated from multiple transactions. Next, we looked at the fact that records are scheduled based upon the content of the record or function of the organization, not file format like blockchain. Then we arrived at the fact that blockchain itself is a fine format and that NARA does not traditionally schedule file format such as PDF or Excel spreadsheets. However, NARA may need to consider in the future how and when records on blockchains will be scheduled. Sometimes metadata about records can be captured in a blockchain. An example might be placed in the hash of a contract in a blockchain so that the validity of the electronic contract can be verified. In this case, there are a few GRS items, general record schedule items that might prove helpful. Sometimes the metadata captured in a blockchain is the record itself, such as a smart contract, recording a change of a deed or real estate. In this instance, the GRS may work and the agency may need to schedule the blockchain item. All right, let's think about transfer now. Transferring records. Any discussion about transferring blockchain records to NARA will be completely theoretical at this point. However, questions that we consider are would NARA have the resources to preserve and ensure a long-term accessibility to that information? Are there special resources needed to archively store blockchain records? And like node and network administration skills, will we have them? And since the records within the blockchain may consist of a variety of record types accumulated for multiple transactions, would NARA be able to access those file formats in the blocks? If parts of the blockchains are cryptographically inaccessible, inaccessible, should NARA accept the transfer. I haven't talked about that term yet, meaning if the records are not accessible, they're cryptographically inaccessible, meaning they're hidden. They're there, but they're hidden. Will we have access to them? Will there be a single creating agency or owner that will transfer the records or transactional data to our archival repository? Would NARA become a node itself in that scenario, the physical transfer of the blockchain records becomes irrelevant? And NARA will have the records already. Some additional implications. Or as we interact with agencies, we, being NARA, we're thinking about blockchain, that are thinking about the use of blockchains. We're pointing them in the direction of the 2016, 2019 success criteria. Both of them had a theme, that was, we call it internally PSAD, policy systems access and disposition. When developing policies to address records management implications, we tell, we tell agencies that they must always consider that when they want to involve themselves with blockchain or any system. They also must implement systems that execute these policies. And ensuring access to blockchain records or transactional data over time is in this paramount. And finally, executing disposition. They must ensure that these systems, including blockchain systems, execute disposition. Or that disposition could be executed with the records on it. Decentralization. The Federal Records Act was originally signed into law in 1950 and from that time until the early 2000s, people have traditionally relied on centralized record keeping models as per applicable statute and their policy in place at the time. In the 2000s, to present, it's been a time of change where that model shifted organizations, where organizations have been spreading the records across multiple systems or siloing their records. Blockchain shifts the responsibility and trust for maintaining electronic records from the structures of those siloed systems of the organization to a distributed network. These are departures from the role of centralized records management that we were once accustomed to. A shift to blockchain could provide the validity and trust that records management systems have traditionally performed. And this shift may impact how records are organized and arranged and maintained over time, which in turn will impact how records managers collect records, apply intellectual and access controls, and execute this position. IT corporations are already beginning to provide blockchain as a service. With these models, the services creates, maintains, and provides the blockchain. Users upload the records to the blockchain. It's fairly common for archival professionals, especially those working with electronic records to have computer or IT skills. Most library information schools include database management, coding, and digital curation. Looking into the future, it's easy to see that electronic records management will require a multidisciplinary approach, which could include computer scientists, software engineers, and archivists. The National Archives was founded in 1934 and became independent agency in 1985. There are billions of pieces of papers, millions of photographs in the area of photos, thousands of films and videos, and terabytes of data. The National Archives name itself garners trust by many, however, this trust comes from the fact that paper records are difficult to alter without some method of discovery. How many of you remember correction tape? When was the last time you used it? Right? So that's where we're getting at. It was paper records where, you know, a little easier to alter than it for electronic records, actually. You can tell when, for example, someone typed over the document after they used whiteout. But electronic records is a little different. Detecting alterations to electronic records is very different with the technology available today, and blockchain offers this ability to preserve the trust in electronic age. Again, that goes back to the hash. If there's any change, the hash will change. We can say, aha. Something has happened here. Let's find out what it is. Okay. Altered information has become a challenge to how the public consumes information. Voice and video editing tools are available to any subscriber. There are video editing tools that allow for facial manipulation of YouTube videos. There are also highly accurate voice editing applications. I told this joke before, but I'll share it again here. This really, really happened. But in preparation for the meeting, well, one of my talks on blockchain, I said, son, he's 11 years old. I said, do you know of any apps on your phone that will change your voice? He said, sure. He takes my cell phone. He goes right in. I didn't know he knew my passcode number one, so I was like kind of surprised. But within seconds, he pulled up, downloaded it, and he was able to pull up a little cat. He said hello to the cat, and the cat said hello back in a different voice. So that's an example of a video audio editing tool. And they get far, far more sophisticated. So the velocity of information held by the National Archives is foundational to our democracy. Video, audio, and photo manipulation presents a unique challenge to the National Archives and its mission to collect, maintain, and provide access to the authentic records of the federal government. Towards this goal, the NARA, when NARA recently released the additional JFK assassination material, each of the bulk download items included a hash in the metadata allowing external entities to validate the digital material had not been altered. Estimating this practice, to all digital narrow holdings will allow the public to independently verify that digital content taken from NARA, NARA's catalog had not been altered. NARA could investigate the possibility of anchoring these hash values in catalog link catalog link in a public blockchain to allow additional public review. Perhaps the most exciting blockchain project happening in the government is over at the National Archives in the UK. The University of Surrey and the National Archives in the United Kingdom have a project named Archangel that is breaking new ground by using blockchain to record checksums. Another metadata derived from either scanned physical records or born digital records to allow verification that their integrity over decades is central on time spans. This data is permanently preserved through peer-to-peer distribution and consists of checking without the need for a trusted third party. Keep hearing that over again. So what does this mean from NARA? Well, number one, we think it's too early for policy. When we're giving you a lot of information about blockchain, you may see the potential applications for records management. However, we currently view blockchain as conceptual and as I demonstrated in the slide, most applications are in pilot stages. Therefore, it is too early to produce formal policy because we're still all in exploratory ages within federal governments. It was only, I think, it's only one that agency, I think, that has really rolled out major use for blockchain. I think that was HHS. But going forward, NARA will continue to talk to agencies and we're referring them to the assessed criteria. Remember PSAD, policy systems, access and disposition to keep those in mind. We'll be talking to them about the universal electronic records management requirements when fielding external inquiries about blockchain or when actually, excuse me, when actually getting involved with blockchain and putting them to use in other applications and systems. And NARA will continue participating in communities of interest and engaging with agencies exploring the use of blockchain. And we will also be following up on this research because that research was done at a point in time. In conclusion, the research was intended to help describe what blockchain technology is for NARA staff and how the federal government is exploring blockchain use and some of the records management implications. The technology is evolving, therefore, the research represents the snapshot, as I said, and beyond providing guidance, we'll be diligent to stay abreast of blockchain's potential impact on basic government functions such as information certification, financial transactions, and identification. Changes in these areas have the potential to fundamentally impact the government's role as a trusted information repository and records holder. Here we list the bibliography. I didn't mention earlier that we, the National Archives, we produced a blockchain white paper. We did it internally, published it internally last fall. In this past spring, we put it out, made it available to the public. And then that blockchain white paper on archives.gov, we do have a bibliography where we've read through a lot of materials and we wanted you to all to know where we've done our research and what we've been reading up on so we can provide that information to you as stakeholders. All right. It's time for questions. Any online? Any in the room? I'm giving you a lot of information but always feel free to reach out to me asking any questions directly. Here's my information. I'm sorry, this is incorrect. It should be eric.douglas, eric.douglas at narrow.gov. Feel free to reach out to me email directly and I'll be happy to speak with you. Next up we have Mr. Kennedy. Good morning, everyone. My name is Derek Kennedy from the Permanent Record Capture Team. Today, this morning, I'm going to speak to you about the 2020 annual move and everything that it entails. The slides I have prepared for you are pretty much straightforward. The purpose is to discuss what agencies can do to prepare for the 2020 annual move. I will tell you that July 15th, agencies will receive their candidate list from us so that you can look over the transfers that are eligible to be kept by NARA. You have to September 1st to let NARA know if the transfers on the listings are good or not. I am going to give you a couple of figures. They're just rough estimates of what the 2020 annual move would look like for this year. We have 116 agencies participating in the annual move this year. The volume of cubic feet is 180,621 and the number of transfers are 12,016. Again, the annual move are for agencies that have records stored at the federal record center. The transfers stored at the federal record center are eligible to move in 2020. Those are including the sweep years and what I mean by sweep years are there are five-year sweeps that include disposition from current cycle years and disposition from previous cycle years that qualify for the annual move. For this annual move, the five-year sweep will consist of 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and the year 2000 which goes back 20 years. The data that you receive is an extract from Arcus that will be later loaded into ERA and the load date of the data that we had the agencies propose is October 1st. The candidate lists are sent to agencies in advance of being loaded into ERA so that the agencies can recognize any issues with the data and get back with us so we can rectify any issues that you have or anything that you see on the spreadsheets that are sent to you. The spreadsheets themselves will be sent to the agency records officers. So if you need a copy of the spreadsheet, you can ask from it from your agency record officer or you can email annual.move at narrow.gov and we will be happy to provide you with a copy of the spreadsheet if you need it. What should agencies do? Agencies should distribute the list to program officers which are responsible for the eligible records. Compare each transfer request on the list to the original 135 and box lists. Check that your agency does not have any of the boxes eligible for transfer to narrow within your position. All boxes should be at FRC. That is important. All the boxes must be at the FRC when the records are eligible to move. If they're not, we won't be able to move them until you return all the boxes. Ensure that the disposition authority is still current. Check to see if the transfers include permanent and temporary records in the same box and if they are temporary and permanent records in the same box the agency needs to separate the material. Also not included in this slide was that if your agency is hiring a new RO or replacing an existing RO you need to send that information to ROupdates at narrow.gov. We sent a memorandum to agencies as a reminder on September 10th, 2018. This memo will probably come out around the same timeframe that you will see as a reminder for agencies who need to update the records officer or who want to establish a new records officer for the agency. Confirm the access restrictions listed are correct. Update Arcus is necessary. If the records are classified check to see that they are going through your agencies internal declassification review. If your agency needs to keep the records and ever see longer than the retention period submit a formal justification and as you can see I provided a link that you can see the document and it'll tell you exactly how to fill it out to get that extension if needed. Notify us through annual.move.nary.gov of any changes by September 1st. If we do not hear from the agencies by September 1st we assume that everything on the spray seat we sent to you was correct. The 2020 annual move TRs can be proposed in ERA beginning on October 1st. Also you will receive a memo stating that the TRs are ready in ERA for the agencies to propose. What I provided here is a simplified agency timeline only. And it's based off of the 2020 annual move. So of course in the beginning of this presentation I stated that on the 15th of July the candidate list will get sent to the agencies. By September 1st the feedback for the candidate list is due. On the 1st of October 2019 the TRs are loaded into ERA. December 1st 2019 TR proposal deadline which means if you would like your records to move for the spring move you have to propose them by December 1st 2019. The next timeline December 2nd through June 1st 2020 proposal deadline for the late summer move that means that you can still propose the 2020 annual move TRs all the way through. It just means that they won't move for the spring move they will move for the late summer or future annual moves as narracies fit. The next timeline for the agencies from April 1st to June 1st that's the timeframe to propose TRs that are due for deletion. So this year TRs that are due for deletion are the 2018 annual move TRs and that deadline of the 1st of June has come and gone. There is a notification sent to agencies that do have TRs that are still in draft and submitted for agency approval status that need to be proposed by the agencies that email is sent out along with the spreadsheet on April 1st. There's also a reminder email sent the week of May 1st saying that you have roughly 30 days left to propose your TRs. If you do happen to need an extension please email annual.move at narra.gov and normally we will grant 30-day extensions but we also ask that you keep in contact with us to let us know your progress on proposing those TRs. For further information everyone should be familiar with the ERA user guide if not there is a link provided in the slide of if you needed any more information the annual move portion of the website I have provided a link that you can go to that will give you a little bit more detailed information and of course I provided the email address if you have any questions or problems or concerns you can email us at annual.move at narra.gov Any questions in the room? Any questions online? What you could do is you could email the annual.move website and you can tell us who you are the records officer of which agencies both agencies and we will be able to identify the records for the move for the 2019 or the upcoming 2020 annual move and we will provide you the spreadsheet for those TRs. Say it one more time. The question was lady in the room is the records officer of two agencies they have combined so she wanted to know how she would be able to receive the permanent records that she would need to propose and my answer to that question was to email us at annual.move at narra.gov tell us your name the agency you work for and the two record groups or agencies you are responsible for and we will identify those agencies and get the spreadsheets to you so then you can begin your process of concurrences or the process of you proposing the TRs at ERA. Any other questions? Thank you for your time. Good morning everyone great to see you again. I'm Gary Roffus I'm the director of the records manager training program and want to spend a few minutes today again reminding you of some changes coming your way. We've been trying to do this fairly regularly just in case folks have missed meetings about changes in training at NARA and also start you thinking about how can I do training in my agency a little bit better? How do I start thinking about that? As NARA starts to back away from some of the training we've been providing for your folks and you take that responsibility it's a good time to think about what all is involved and put together good training so we're going to go over that a little bit this morning up so just a reminder this is the last year that NARA will be doing training for your folks unless you are a designated agency records officer so we will continue to provide training for those SAORM records officers but we will not train all the other folks that you have been sending to NARA for all these years so that will end at the end of this fiscal year we sent out an email from the chief records officer to your senior agency officials as well as most of you a couple of weeks ago a reminder we're trying to identify any records officer that might need training between October and December so the end of this fiscal year we're essentially going to stop teaching the knowledge area courses that most of you are familiar with we will start teaching our new curriculum in January of 2020 so we know there's a small window there where there might be a few records officers that still need to get their certificate done in that first quarter we will run courses only for those folks rather than large classes for everybody once we have them identified so far I've only got three names so I'm not going to run courses for three people hopefully we'll see if there are other folks that you need to identify whether you anticipate bringing on a new component records officer maybe you're anticipating moving please talk to your senior agency officials or you can email me also directly yourself we definitely want to make sure that we're providing an opportunity for those records officers to get their certificate if they need it in the first quarter of 2020 but so far it doesn't look like there's a large need so we'll keep an eye on that we did ask for those responses by the end of June so a couple of more weeks to think through that if you haven't gotten it and get back to us again we want to make sure we take care of it for the records officers and work through the rest of this transition so we pause there any questions on what's going on with training for the records officers the rest of this year and concerns you have okay well continue on that so as you start to take more responsibility for training your folks it can be a little daunting and often we get this wrong and I don't mean you but I mean everybody that does training right I can't tell you how many times I've sat in a room with folks that said oh we need to do some training and then they immediately start talking about what they want to teach well let's talk about this let's talk about that people need to know this and they completely overlook the fact that they have no idea how people are going to use what they're going to learn so I'm going to ask you all as you start thinking about who needs what training in your agencies for the topic of records management first think about what is it that you need them to do on the job with records management whether it's every employee in the agency or records custodians or liaisons you have to start there because if not we can build lots of great training that gives them a whole bunch of information that they'll never use on the job so it might be a rewarding experience I might like that information might be good to know but I might never figure out what it actually accomplished for me when I go back and do my work another part of that is we often use training to solve things that can't do so often here are people saying hey you know somebody's not doing this particular task they need training really do they know how to do it oh they do but we're still going to give them training so as part of your thinking up front I think you need to find out why is it that people are not able to do things in records management they need to do is that they don't know how in which case training can help but often there are a lot of other barriers in the workplace to prevent people from performing so for example if you don't give them the tools to do the job even if they know how they can't do it if they're supervisors don't give them the time and the authority to do the work there's another barrier that often comes up so before you throw training at a problem that you see in your records management in your agency make sure it's actually a skill and knowledge problem that you're trying to solve training will not help you with any other kind of organizational problems that you come up with all right can help with skill and knowledge that's it and then focus on who are the people now right so now we know what they need to do we've made sure they actually don't know how to do it now let's think about them a little bit more what do we know about that audience where the backgrounds where the experiences they've had when they come into training all that's going to inform what we think about when we put the training together later on right so I'm certainly not going to write training for every employee in the agency the same way that I would write training for your senior executives right very different audiences with different ways that they're going to approach learning okay so now we've identified what to do often now we skip we go okay let me start putting the PowerPoint slides together right now we know what content we want let's start building slides again back up let's write some learning objectives that actually tell us what somebody is expected to be able to know and do at the end of the training so that we can measure whether or not the training is actually working people come to training all the time we don't test them they leave training they go back to the job and you go wait a second I sent them the training I just don't understand why they can't do what I thought they were going to be able to do after training well did we even verify that they learned what they were supposed to learn in the training while they were there right so that's often a problem if we don't know what we're trying to do in training then we can't measure it so start with those learning objectives make sure they're measurable right often I see in training people write oh I want them to understand the federal records act tell me how you measure understanding we might be better served to say hey they need to be able to explain what a record is or and what is not a record okay that I can measure is that tie back to the federal records act yes all right so be very careful about what you do there what do I mean by what does right look like that performance that we talked about on the first slide what do you want them to do make sure you know what correct looks like what are you going to measure successful job performance on seems straightforward often overlooked when we build training third and fourth bullets are the most important one if you take nothing away from this today please leave with this if you do not ask people to practice the thing that they are learning during the training give them feedback so they know whether or not they are learning it correctly or not don't bother doing the training you won't know whether or not they've learned and they will have no idea how to use it correctly when they when they leave or if they've even learned it correctly right so as you build your training make sure you make time for them to practice what they're learning if in doubt make more time for practice and delivering the content because if they're practicing and you missed some content you can fill it in when you see them practicing if you don't give them time to practice you have no idea what they are or aren't learning in that training all right and lastly we actually learned from this so include some measurement of performance at the end of the training whether that's doing a task could be also a written test but you need to think about if you're writing a written test or test items do they come as close to what you want somebody to do as possible so again rather than asking somebody the definition of a federal record if I actually need them to separate record and non-record information maybe I should give them some samples and let them identify which is a record and not a record rather than asking for that definition then we set out to build this training right constraints are always a big thing we overlook time money where your people are at to receive the training are they going to travel do you have to do it online in what formats can you deliver what tools do you have available right that's going to influence what decisions you make for your media selection again simple thing is let's just build PowerPoint slides but there are a lot of other things you can do right as early as possible now get people involved in doing some user testing right find some of those folks that are in your audience for the training get them they'll look at some of your early attempts at what you're building get their feedback very very important to know no different than anything else we do these days where user testing helps us iterate and make the product better if you are going to distribute this throughout a large department think about how you're going to prepare the instructors right sending out a PowerPoint deck and a participant guide for training to all your components in the department of defense and saying go train it means that each one of those people that gets it is likely to teach it very very differently unless you take some steps to figure out how you're going to get them on the same page right and last did we actually check our materials both for quality and accessibility another common thing particularly in training these days is we figure forget about accessibility we've got great authoring tools now that can do really really cool things and an awful lot of things that they will build cannot be made 508 compliant so we've got to take some deliberate steps to make sure we're making it available to everyone plus you now we go to execute pretty straightforward let's find a great instructor we've got great training let's go do it make sure we help tie it back to what they have to do on the job if you don't help people see the relevance of what they're learning again they might do great in a class they may never go back and use it on the job really really important to do that right really important to people help people get engaged in the training collaborations really important I hate to tell you all this but if you're the one doing the teaching you don't have all the knowledge all the experience all of those great employees to come to your training have a lot of great knowledge they bring with them having people share what they've already learned within the context of your training is equally as beneficial as to whatever you planned in your training so make sure they're working together and then obviously to the degree that we can depending on how you're delivering the training have some flexibility if something is not going well hopefully your instructor instructors or the way you've designed the instruction can adapt and meet the needs of the people in that room every audience is going to be different to the best that you've planned up to this point something will be different than you thought if you just drive straight through the way you designed that training you're missing an opportunity to make the learning better for some of the people in the room based on what's going on at that particular moment or online depending on how you deliver it so don't get too rigid with your plan lots of people go to training learn a ton of stuff then they go back to a job and never use it right so part of this we can plan for we can think about when you're designing the training in your agencies how do you keep them on the hook after that training event has finished often we'll do that through communities of practice where people have a place to come back together virtually share information keep problem solving as they try to apply what they've learned right if you are small enough that you can actually track people back to their workplace I would encourage you to think about planning some of those practice activities for when they go back on the job I'll give you an example when we rolled out your capstone forms internally inside our office a couple of years ago we built online training for our appraisers to work through practicing evaluating the form they had a full practice activity in that online training got feedback did I do well or not then we also built two more practice activities that were handed to their supervisors and they were done within the team structure at the end of the e-learning so it was spaced out over time they got repeated practice and they got to do it closer to the context in which they're actually going to perform it at work so you can plan those things if you have visibility on where the people are after training does it make sense for all employees in your in your organization but it may make sense for your record staff right so you can have them practice doing some of these things after they've done whatever the training event is so let's say you bring your custodians in you're going to do some training on an inventory you're getting ready to conduct well you can do the training and it will set them loose and never talk to them again until it comes time to do the inventory or you could actually do the training send them back to their office have them inventory their own file drawer send that in to get feedback on that practice and then maybe scale it up to the next level and continue that practice on the way to now you're ready to execute your full inventory so think about how you transfer back to the job what you're asking them to learn in training particularly useful for your record staff and last how do we collect feedback on how we're doing right once you build that training you want to know how it's going just because people liked it doesn't mean they're going to learn from it in fact there's some pretty good data that tells us there's absolutely almost no correlation to when not someone likes training and when that's to learn we still want to know hey was it a good positive experience because maybe we can make it better but don't just ask that make sure that you're asking hey did you like this experience what could we improve and that you're measuring what did they actually learn from it all right and if you can then go find out what did they take back and use on the job those three pieces will give you enough information to make decisions about how do you improve and train change the training for the next time you run it so a little over you just in thinking about planning your training as you go you don't have to do it by yourself though right you all are records professionals you didn't come here to be a training professional but now we're asking you to take a little bit more of that role so first you can always email our team right we we've got folks that are experts in records management as well as training we're happy to help you plan this in fact we can probably help you look at things we've already built that might fit some of your need too once we understand the learning need and in your in your agency you have people in your agencies that should be full-time professionals doing training in particular you would be looking for folks in the GS 1750 job series instructional system specialist if you don't have those look for somebody that's a training specialist they should have experienced designing stuff right you can also go look up if you have books 24-7 or in your learning management system you might have resources that teach you how to build training already there instructional design for dummies right we can all do this and if not a couple sites there you can search for with some experts in the industry that are they're really accessible these folks have done a good job explaining what works for learning and what works for e-learning and kind of layman's term so you're going to avoid all the theory all the jargon behind it and just see good examples of what I need to think about what I need to do so the number of places you can get help I'd encourage you to do that just like any topic we can do it we can pull it off all of us have sat through training so we think we know what good training is we're not entirely wrong but we might be missing an opportunity to make it better by getting somebody that that's the profession involved in helping us along the way so with that let me let me open the floor to general questions about what's going on about changes in the training program or any questions you might have specifically about hey I was thinking about working on this training I got this dilemma I'm up against can you offer some advice on that any questions about the training yes ma'am we'll bring a mic up to you so they can hear you online too so if you wait just a minute yes my question is would you be leaving the K the K-A I guess the K-A1 through 6 training modules on the NARA website even as you roll into the new training modules that you're developing absolutely so we we're in the midst of in fact if you're here this afternoon I may ask you to look at some pages that we're building for our website the knowledge here of courses will remain up there for the foreseeable future we do not have a plan to take them offline at some point a few years from now we're probably going to get to the place where you all tell us that that content's become so dated it's no longer helpful that's when we'll start looking at pulling them down so we're going to take a lot of that Q from you but our intent is to leave them online and as a reminder we've put PDFs online so those were the the way to make them most accessible and that's what our web team had guided us to do if you need the source documents whether it's the word document of the participant guide or the powerpoint of the slides if you would just email us and they will work with you to get those transferred to you so if you wanted to take parts of it and alter it you certainly are welcome to we just need to not put those on the website in their current format so we can get those to you through a file transfer site and we'll do it that way other questions about training you all are being easy this morning aren't anything online okay well thank you oh yep go ahead wait for the records officers that already have been certified with the new training will they have to go through the new certification process ah great question I was wondering does it come it comes up almost every time right let me tell you where I'm at in the midst of the policy and so we have the draft policy for the note program goes to our executive leader team today so we'll wait for their feedback as things stand right now everyone that is currently have this has the certificate will essentially be grandfathered into the new program so no new requirement right we are proposing that there will be a renewal for every records officer periodically so you won't have to do the new curriculum but you will come up for a renewal of your certificate just like everybody else at some point in the future and once I get feedback from my executives I'll be up here to share more of those details with you I don't want to get in front of what we think is I think we've got things nailed down it's pretty solid but you never know when you pass it up the line what other idea comes in yet but so everyone should be grandfathered in is our intent at this point and then every records officer will have a periodic renewal that comes up that says yes I've kept my knowledge current of what's going on with records management I have another question for each agency is it just one records officer for that particular agency or can you have multiple records officers so it depends on the agency in most cases what you see is I'm going to use like the department of defense as one example where you've got a records officer that is responsible for the entire department but then they've got sub records officers at the smaller components so I think the biggest thing we see is size matters large departments have multiple records officers usually the records officers is where their logical agency components are I don't know that I've seen where at a fairly more granular level there's more than one records officer I can think of one example in my head but not a lot I'm not sure Maggie have you seen that very many yeah it's generally one so and the best place to look for this is on archives.gov where if you go into the records management section we have a listing of all the agency records officers so you can start to see where things have been broken out in the large departments and how it goes the one that comes to my mind is Veterans Affairs that at one time or another has had two agency records officers identified but in most cases it's one to one. Okay my reason for asking is I'm looking at retirement at the end of the fiscal year at the end of the calendar year excuse me so if we were bringing a new records officer on board try to get them in for the last leg of the training for the records management certificate would that be doable because actually they won't be the actual records officer you understand what I'm saying if your SAO identifies them ahead of time and sends me a note and says hey we're in this transition I'm not actually going to officially designate them till this point in January but this is my plan we'll put that person on the list to get the training. Okay great thank you. No issues at all absolutely. Any other questions come to mind would the renewal include those who are not senior staff? So by senior staff I'm going to assume you mean a designated agency records officer right and that answer is going to be no we are only going to require a renewal for SAORM designated agency records officers we we are hoping again I I don't want to preach you too much because you never know how the landscape changes on you right we are hoping to make a very clear distinction that separates the current certificate of file records management training from the new curriculum the new program going forward so that there's no confusion about oh I got my certificate of file records management training five years ago I was never a records officer is it still valuable? Well yes you completed that training so we're going to try to make a very clear distinction there so that that doesn't come up but the renewal is only going to be required for designated agency records officers did that answer the question anything Gary? Yes. Okay anything else? All right then well let me turn it back to Gordon to wrap up for the day thank you okay we should have online Steve Areta from the Pacific Northwest out in Seattle Steve are you there? I am here can you hear me? Yes we can't okay so uh Steve is going to talk about the destruction challenges facing the federal records in the program and Steve when you're ready I will just advance your first slide and you can let me know how to move forward great thank you I'm sorry I'm here as a disembodied voice but I couldn't make the trip to to DC at this at this late stage what I'd like to do in the next few minutes is talk a little bit about where the destruction program in the federal records center has come from historically where we're at currently and what we hope to do in the future so Gordon if you could move the next slide and I can't see whether you're moving it or not so here we go just keep going you keep going about eight years ago seven to eight years ago we tried to consolidate all disposal in a national contract it was a different world then than it is now and at the time we couldn't pull together a national contract because there wasn't anyone that could dispose of things nationwide there was a great variation in the recycling market across the across the country so over a three-year period we let 14 individual contracts for five years and and options covering 17 federal record centers next slide please okay two of those contracts lapsed earlier this year five additional contracts lapsed in the last week we have the additional contracts that will lapse in the coming years we've made a concerted effort to destroy all records that have been approved for disposal during this fiscal year and have gotten about as much as we can disposed of currently we will continue for the rest of the year but there will be some records left that will not be able we will not be able to destroy this year and this is due to a variety of factors A was the government shut down we normally do about 30,000 cubic feet a week of disposal during the government shut down we had to drop down to about 10,000 a little over 10,000 cubic feet because agencies were not allowed to pay out funds for us we were not allowed to interact with agencies to approve disposal so that had us a little bit hard in addition just recently one of our main plants that we provide disposal services for underwent a fire not the pulping aspect of it but their finished product were cereal boxes and hygiene types of recycled paper could not be dealt with so that slowed us down a little bit then right on top of that we had the floods in the Midwest and their facility closed down due to that and we're hoping that they will get back online here about June 16th is when we've heard but we haven't got a firm date for that next slide please when we're putting together the current contracts like I said it's a different world from when it was seven or eight years ago now we have CUI requirements it's been it was a decision made at the time that we would have a single stream of of disposal that would cover all aspects of our of our disposition paper other than classified or non-textual in order to meet ISO's requirement for CUI paper materials the end product has to be unreadable indecipherable and irrecoverable to meet this requirement the CUI requirement ISO provided three different ways to do this one was shredding materials to a one millimeter by five millimeter size this is about half the size of your current lead pencil or we could incinerate everything which is very costly or we could do direct pulping of material from whole documents right into the pulping stream next side please there is no facility that we've been able to find in the past 12 to 18 months that shreds to that particular size in the quantity of material that we needed to be shredded in addition shredding to that that size negates any recyclable that just destroys the fibers to the point where the material cannot be recycled and would end up in landfill and we would add an additional cost one of the things that our program has striven for over the last 50 plus years is to make the dealing with your temporary records and your permanent records as economically as possible and that we continue to make that our hallmark today there are smaller facilities you know somebody can roll up to your office and shred their your materials one to two times and you can meet that particular standard however it's not something that can we don't have and found a facility that can handle the material at the volume that we we need to ship it out and then again as I said the small shred size cannot be recycled which adds to the cost we have found one facility that we continue to use that pulps documents directly but they are centralized in the eastern part of the United States and cannot service all the facilities we have across the country we've looked into incineration those costs have varied but we're looking at nearly $25 a box to incinerate records and that's at our cost not not what we would have to charge you for next slide please again I just somehow that got doubled there so we're trying to strive to meet the unreadable and indecipherable and irrecoverable aspect of your records one this has been a perfect storm this past year in addition to plants going offline our contracts ending China's withdrawal from the recycling market has created a glut of product and just previously we were able to recoup a small amount from recycling which we use to hold down costs to the agencies this is no longer the case there is and last just this last week we looked at the markets across the country recycled paper was getting $0 and that's affected us and will affect our ability to provide service to you next slide please so we've been working with ISO and our contractors to look ahead at two-step process a process where we shed shred I'm sorry shred to industrial standard which is five eighths or better take the pulp the bailed materials once they've been shredded so it's the materials are going to have to be transported twice we're building this into our requests for quotations for new new contracts we're trying to have a primary contract or we will have a primary contractor that will meet all ISO and CUI requirements for intellectual security the point where the records are destroyed and ensure the physical security from the FRCs to the shredding plants and to the pulping facility the pulping facilities are not all that concerned about security they just look at that as a raw product to go into their stream of of pulp and make new products of it so we're looking at next slide please we're looking at hopefully getting new contracts up towards the end of this for the fourth quarter we're looking to offset the contract loss currently um transshipment of records for destruction when practical reduction of the backlogs before we lose the contracts that are coming up for for renewal next slide please we expect this year to destroy about 1.3 million cubic feet that's down slightly a couple of hundred thousand cubic feet from the last few years do which were elevated due to the till lift another freeze lift on destructions we believe good current estimates that there will be about 150,000 cubic feet of approved disposal which we will unlikely to be destroyed this fiscal year due to the contract loss and that perfect storm of a fire and flooding that hasn't allowed us to um transship records from FRCs like we would like if you need are interested or have concerns about your specific disposal the CRM staff Gordon staff will be able to provide specific numbers after the 1st of July that's when the next round of disposal authorizations are due next slide Gordon looking forward to next year and and the new IA's that that we will work with your agencies with we're exploring proposal a proposal to request that agencies decontrol their CUI records at some point in the disposal process either when they've become eligible for destruction or potentially after they've been shredded it's one thing to deal with whole documents it's another thing to deal with shredded material that seriously cannot be reconstructed unless you spend thousands of hours and I don't believe anybody's got the wherewithal to reconstruct shredded documents that are in bales that have been totally mixed this will allow for disposing of records in the most cost-efficient and secure manner also just to let you know that we are currently looking at our rates for 2020 we're thinking there may be a specialized CUI rate for boxes that agencies want whole box destruction we have the current rates for classified materials which run I believe about $35 a box if we have to do that we will either expand the description of that disposal unit or implement a second or a third actually disposal rate for CUI records we're hoping to get like I said everything back and running here and by the end of the fourth quarter but there will be some materials that we will not be able to dispose for you this fiscal year and that wraps up my presentation for the moment if there are any questions I'd be glad to entertain them okay we do have one question up top any other questions we have one any online at this point all right we have a second question in the room on that side hold on just second Steve certainly yes so for the records that have been identified to be destroyed that you can't destroy will there be a new notation on the O1 report since we won't be able to actually provide a disposal date but is there some type of way to make note on our O1 reports that they have been approved for destruction but because of the lack of the resources well Gordon I'll punt this to you I haven't seen the most recent O1 reports is there a status notice on that that would include approved for disposal but not yet destroyed not sure if there's a status notice but we certainly would be able to provide that information for you if there are some records that have not been disposed that should have been disposed we can identify those records for you okay and then will the agency still be charged well your storage fees stopped after 90 days okay okay they stop automatically after 90 days if for some reason we haven't disposed of those records at that time okay thank you okay yes ready question on this side thank you I have a related question so if we approve disposal of the records and they can't be destroyed do they stay at the record center or do they go somewhere else also because if we get a FOIA request we have to honor that request if even if they've been approved but not actually destroyed so just wondering if they go anywhere yeah those records are still like completely great see records will remain at the federal record center until such time as they can go to the the shredding plant or the or the pulping plant we will maintain them within the federal record center until we can prove the shipment of them away from there okay thank you any other questions around disposal any questions online okay thanks very much Steve we don't seem to have any other questions in the room thanks very much thank you thank you folks already thank you with that are there any questions for any of the speakers today if not please note that the next bridge meeting is Tuesday August 27th at nine o'clock we'll have our coffee and donut hour and network an hour we'll do that here and we'll meet here again on Tuesday August 22nd second just a reminder that this afternoon from at one o'clock the appraisal our appraisal team one will meet up in the Washington room okay if there's nothing else I hope everyone has a wonderful day thank you