 Good morning everyone. Happy tax day. As you can see from the slide, hopefully everyone got their taxes off and wrote that check. So welcome to the combined February and April bridge meetings. I want to start by putting you all on notice. I did not watch Game of Thrones last night. Okay? So no one talked to me about the show. I'm not turning on my phone today. I'm not on social media. Hopefully I can make it until nine o'clock tonight so I can catch up. And I know there's a couple other people in this audience, so if you didn't see the show and you don't want to have it ruined, raise your hand. There you go. Okay, so there's a few people. So hopefully you were able to join us this morning. We had our coffee hour outside the McGowan Theater this morning. We have changed it from being upstairs to right outside the auditorium. So hopefully that is more convenient for you. And if you weren't able to join us, please do so at nine o'clock before our next bridge meeting. I'd like to thank the FRCP for co-hosting and helping to sponsor the coffee hour. So also want to also let you know that this afternoon we have our meet and greet session. Today it'll be upstairs in the Washington and Jefferson rooms. It is hosted by appraisal teams two, three, and four today. So you'll have a chance to meet your appraisal archivist, meet other NARA staff including the reps from the FRCP and other NARA staff in attendance. Also Maggie Hawkins, director of records management operations is going to go a little bit deeper into one of the topics we're going to cover this morning on posting records schedules to regulations.gov. So please join us this afternoon if you work with appraisal teams two, three, and four. Also just logistics for those of you in the audience. If you have a question at any point during the program, we have microphones on the aisles. Please identify who you are and what agency you came from. We're also monitoring chat on the webcast. So please do the same. Let us know who you are and what agency you're from and we'll make sure we get your question asked. Also we like to hear from you if you have any general comments about the bridge meeting. So we would love to hear from you at RM Communications through our mailbox. If you have any suggestions on how we can make bridge better for you, please let us know. So before I get into the agenda, we have an introduction of a new NARA executive that many of you will be working with going forward. So at this point, I'm going to bring J trainer, the executive for agency services to make the introduction. So good morning. I'm J trainer, executive for agency services here at NARA, which includes the chief records officer and the Federal Records Center program that you see here at bridge all the time. But it also includes the Information Security Oversight Office, the Office of Government Information Services and the National Declassification Center. And I have the honor this morning of introducing Bill Fisher as the new director of the NDC. Bill actually came on board the Monday we stood up after the government shutdown. But Bill was will serve as the second director of the NDC. The NDC was created in 2009. And Bill will be the second director of that organization here at NARA. Bill actually worked for NARA from 1998 to 2008 would have been in one of these seats at one point because he worked on some archival things, but also on records management at the National Archives. Then he left us and went to the State Department for about 10 years, worked on a variety of aspects at the State Department that included records management, but also included declassification activities. And most recently worked on a project involving the government 16 agencies throughout the federal government declassifying records from that dealt with Argentina. And it's kind of a note because on Friday, we had a very big celebration here at Archives one where the archivist United States handed over the last documents to the government of Argentina. So with that, let me bring up Bill Fisher and introduce him as the next director of the National Declassification Center. Thank you, Jay. I feel like I'm sort of at home here and I'm just going to take just a minute very briefly to say that my background, as Jay mentioned, and you can see up here is spanned records management, information access, including declassification. And so for my part, I would just like to stress the importance of records managers working with information access professionals in your agencies and for my own particular interest for declassification programs. It may sound like somewhat of a cliche, but I actually believe it and I think it's true. And that is that records management is the backbone of effective, accountable and transparent government. Okay, and I've seen it in my career working at the National Archives, working in an agency and now back at the National Archives. The importance of records managers working with their declassification folks, their FOIA people in order to get good solid tracking and control over their records and understanding of their records in the electronic sphere in terms of good solid metadata, schemas, formatting issues. And when records managers and declassification professionals work together, plan and sort of chart a course, it just makes it a heck of a lot easier on the back end at the end of the records life cycle, when you are reaching final disposition, when you're at the point of conducting declassification reviews and transferring records to have all of that squared away. So anyway, that's all I wanted to say. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but it's essential for records management to have a seat at that table and to bring in these other folks in order to really, you know, have a good solid management of your records across the full life cycle with that. Thank you. Okay, so before we get into our program, just wanted to review the agenda so you can see what it looks like. We're going to start with David Williams going to review agency disposition profiles, which many of you should already have in hand. David was snowed in in Chicago, so he's going to be joining us by phone. Our next presentation is David Miller going to talk about current digitization services offered by the FRCP and David Miller actually made it in from Philadelphia. Then we're going to, as I mentioned, Maggie's going to talk about posting record schedules to regulations.gov. We're going to have a training update from our training director, Gary Ralfus. We are then going to have Lisa Harold Lampus, director of policy and outreach at in within the office of the chief records officer talk about digitization regulation update. We are then going to have Jim come up and talk about changes to the website. I will then pretend to be Don Rosen, who is on vacation this week, and just give you a quick update on where we are with the reporting period and the milestones and deadlines coming up. And then we're going to, if we have time, and there's a lot on this agenda, so we're hoping we do have some time at the end of the program, we're just going to do a Q&A session with me and the other managers and representatives from NARA, just to see what's on your mind, have some discussion about things that are going on in your agencies or coming out of NARA that you'd like to talk to us about. So we will see how that goes. So with that, I am going to turn it over to Jim, who is going to connect David Williams and talk to you about the disposition profile. Can you hear me, Jim? We can now, David, yes. Okay, great. Well, thank you. So yes, as Lawrence mentioned, I am joining from Chicago. I guess it was inevitable because last time I was out there, I believe I was complaining about the weather in DC. And so I got to experience thunder snow yesterday in the middle of April for the first time in my life. So yeah, I guess I will take DC weather over Chicago weather and count my blessings next time. So yeah, I'm here to talk just a bit about the agency disposition profile. Next slide, please. And they should have gone out on April 1, 2019. If you did not get yours, please let your account manager know. And those should have gone, by the way, to agency record officers and SAORMs. So if you are not one of those people, please let your agency record officer know. And then I'm just going to go, you might have noticed it's a little different this year. So I'm just going to review the FY19 changes compared to what you've seen in previous years. Next slide, please. So this is just, I know it's going to be very hard to see because there's a lot on the slide. I just wanted to put the two up right next to each other, just so you can see there's just a little bit difference in the format. We added another field in 2019 and put a little bit more information on there. Next slide, please. All right, so here I just, on each slide I went through and highlighted the substantive changes. There were some minor changes like we didn't have cubic feet under the pending section in 2018, and I didn't see a need to highlight that. But you'll notice on the first section last year we spelled out pending deferred and et cetera. And this year we just referred to those as ambiguous disposition records. Maybe if some of you were at the bridge meeting last April, you heard Marcus Most talk about ambiguous disposition records. And that is the new term that we are using what we previously called limbo codes. But the official term is ambiguous disposition. And then we put a little below that that called out what the ambiguous disposition records include. Next slide, please. So here's the first where we put something out into a different section. Last year in section two we had the TIL records and the unscheduled records. This year the TIL is, I believe, done. And that is not on the age disposition profile anymore. And then the unscheduled records you will see on the next slide that we moved to it to its own section. And then we also put a total of the volume for in 2019. Next slide, please. And here's where we have the unscheduled records. Because really they, you know, they weren't, it didn't make sense to put them in the past. This was just in section. And so we put them in their own section. And then just a little note that because it's, you know, it is a mix theoretically of what's going to end up being temporary and permanent for the annual cost we use the 50-50 mix. Next slide, please. Not really much of a change here. We did include some of the, for some agencies it'll be all of your freezes. But if you have a lot of freezes in place, we put really kind of the major freezes that are there. Certainly if you have questions about freezes in place, another question you can refer to your account manager. Next slide, please. This section, other than a different number in 2018, there was no change. And next slide. Are there any questions? Am I still connected? I was waiting to see. We don't see anybody headed towards the microphones, Dave. So I don't think there are any questions. Okay, great. Well, you'll notice I did put Scott Rowley's information up here, not mine. He really is the expert on this profile, and it did come from his office. So if you do have any questions that maybe you, that might be beyond what your account manager may, may know the answer to, please feel free to refer those to Scott Rowley. And if there are no questions, then that'll wrap up my portion. Okay, thanks, Dave. We're going to turn it back over to Lawrence now, or I'm sorry, we're going to turn it over to Dave Williams, or Dave Miller. All right, thanks. I'm the latest Dave to talk to you. I'm David Miller. Let's see if I can advance these slides. Okay. I just want to talk briefly about the Federal Records Centers program and talk about our digitization services. I think I come to Bridge every couple of years to remind you that we do offer those services, both large scale projects, scale scanning, as well as one-off reference scanning for records that are stored in the records centers. So I'm going to brief you a little bit about where we are and how that process works if you want to work with us and get some of your records digitized. Especially with our strategic plan, every agency needs to be thinking deep thoughts about what to do with whatever analog records you still have. Certainly we're moving very rapidly towards all digital government and born digital records can be managed digitally. But in many cases we have hybrid collections or legacy analog records that still have business value, still have maybe historical value that you need to take some action to make sure that you've handled responsibly over the next couple of years, especially after 2022 when you're unable to transfer analog records to the FRCs or accession those into the National Archives. So over the next couple of years you should be thinking about what what the most valuable paper or analog records you might have floating around your agency or still in active use and thinking about what you need to do to digitize those if those have ongoing business needs. So of course our core service at the FRCP for this is really just the conversion itself getting those records from analog form into a digital format so you can make use of them for ongoing business systems or for archival preservation. But alongside that we really think of these as records projects or records management projects with a scanning component. So we really ask serious questions of you as the records owner about what your access points are what your needs are in terms of indexing and metadata. In some cases we can capture that metadata automatically through the scanning process. In other cases we can key in later after the fact to apply item or collection level metadata to make those records more useful. But that's something certainly that's part of our conversation whenever we work with an agency who asks us about scanning we're not just talking about getting records from paper to scan but there's everything that goes alongside that both before and after the scanning process. We're very interested in the quality control especially because most of the records that I think that that you need to scan that are most cost-effective to scan are of long-term value or historical value or things you're going to be keeping for decades and decades and we want to do it right. We want to make sure those images are you know readable and usable for your business but also for historical records that those are of high enough quality that the public reference public public research is going to be available for those. We do large project scanning in terms of you might have hundreds of cubic feet or thousands of cubic feet as the case may be of legacy records that we can scan for you and we that's where we want to get into some of the details about your requirements and some of the metadata and the access points but we also offer one-off reference scanning I think you're probably aware of this for records that are stored in the federal record centers for a number of years we've offered smart scan services where you can get very quick reference copy scans delivered back to you securely either within 24 hours or 48 hours depending on the size of the little quest that's available to all of our record centers for anything you already have stored with us and if you're thinking about transferring new records in that might be part of your your reference practice that you expect you'll have a certain amount of digital reference on those records rather than mailing them back to you when they're needed we offer that that smart scan service across our system this is we just to highlight the areas where the record center tries to offer our services as close to cost as possible so we're trying to save money as much as possible find efficiencies where we can these steps in the process are areas where depending on your requirements depending on your needs the price may have to go up or down depending on what decisions we make if the records are well managed if these are records that are in good order they're well labeled they're not too difficult to deal with the document preparation of these records for scanning might be minimal and that might not be very costly at all but if the records are a mess if they're voluminous if they're complex if there are a lot of different parts to them and the different kinds of formats within those records on that document preparation might be a significant effort the scanning itself of course different resolutions different color versus black and white or gray scale we're gonna see different throughput and it's going to be a different cost for us to be able to deliver those images to you so you understanding your records the best you're the creators you're the owners you've got some scanning requirements about what you need to see that output image and look like and what resolution it needs to be and what you want to use that image for scanning might be the easiest part of it the most straightforward part of the process it's everything around the scanning that might be more more challenging in many cases the indexing and metadata like I said that's that's super important for us because we're looking at the ongoing business use or just access to these records we're not just scanning for the sake of scanning so the indexing and metadata whether you as records creators already have a good system of item level or aggregate level metadata or access points that we can make use of and we can point those images to those indexes that's fine or in some cases we're creating entirely new indexes and creating new metadata through the process and it will increase your access to to the records likewise but if we're doing a lot of the indexing a lot of the metadata if we're doing a lot of work to do metadata capture that might increase your per image cost on a given scanning project if you're absorbing that burden if you've got folks in your shop who can do the metadata who can do the indexing who can link those images to a system and make access happen on your side the cost for the scanning part will be a lot less and of course quality control alongside all of this depending on whether these are permanent records temporary records what have you we might have different regimen for quality control to make sure that we're getting images that are what you need and the quality that you need and the last one in yellow that we can't read is image delivery the final point how do you want these images given to you whether they're on an encrypted hard drive whether we're setting up some sort of secure transfer mechanism delivering those images back to you as records owners so you can take those records and put them in your business systems and make use of them that's that's roughly the process and that's roughly where we have decision points that might affect the cost one way or the other in summary we do customized indexing if needed we produce archival formats for output so you can not just use these for your business but eventually accession these records into the national archives a good recent example of that we've been doing a project with the park service and we've got a lot of high quality images in our in the NARA catalog for the national historic landmarks and national historic places so if you want to look to the NARA catalog get an example of what that finished product looks like for archival records you can do a search on any one of our any one of the states around the country for historic landmarks and pull up those records that's work that we did on in conjunction with park service and of course quality assurance is part of what we're about that's we don't do this just to do it quickly and cheaply we do it so it's done responsibly so you get a good finished product so we have a quality assurance process we have quality control throughout using the technology and the individuals in our program to do it right if you've got any questions you can contact me directly I'll be at the meet and greet for those of those of you sticking around for the afternoon I will be around for the meet and greet at one o'clock if you've got specific questions about collections that you have you can contact me directly or you can send an email to our our FRCP scanning email box and one of us will will will act on that of course your account managers many of them are in the room today you can contact your FRCP account manager directly as well and he or she will act on this and we'll we'll get together with you any questions for the moment on scanning or digitization you wait for the mic please good morning Tommy Lee from the Air Force question Mr. Miller can the FRCP digitize hard copy analog records that are at the classified and top secret level unfortunately we can only class we can only scan records unclassified at this point we don't have the classified scanning capabilities that you're talking about no piggybacking does that include CUI material yes we can scan CUI material plenty of our yeah we we routinely handle CUI PII health information as long as it's not classified and we've got a secure delivery of that of that material so the PII and CUI is handled appropriately Sammy here do you have a reference to someone that does the scanning for classified that we can talk to unfortunately at this point we don't have a direct reference for someone who can do classified scanning we don't have that capability and yeah we don't direct you to any anyone in the private sector in particular who might be able to do that any last questions about scanning digitization or at least this part of it I know Lisa is talking later about the the regulatory side of things with scanning but in terms of FRCP services I guess we're we're good and I'll be around at one o'clock for the meet and greet if anyone has any more specific questions thank you good morning glad to see you all here we're going to take just a brief break from digitization and talk a little bit about the changes to the public commenting process on proposed record schedules so I'm going to talk about the old process and then talk about the new process show you a few screenshots of the new process and also discuss some of the reasons why we're moving to the new process and what impact it may have on all of you as federal agencies so I wanted to talk a little bit about the old process as many of you know all record schedules that have temporary records on the schedule are posted to the federal register for notice for notice to the public for a chance to comment on those schedules it only applies to schedules with temporary records and as I'll reference in one of the later slides it is required by statute so as part of this old part of our old process for years we've been publishing abstracts of the record schedules after they've been through the know our review process and so members of the public then would have a chance to read those abstracts and they would have had to have contacted us by email to request a copy of the schedule and the appraisal memo to review them and send us any comments by email we then would engage in conversations back and forth with the requester via email sometimes in multiple rounds sometimes not and that until we reached a resolution and then would work with the agency on potentially changing the schedule or moving forward as is so that was the old process and I want to talk a little bit about the new process and when I talk about that I'll give a little bit more information about what kind of comments we got and how we address them so under the new process what we'll be doing is we are still posting a notice in the federal register and it will not contain an abstract of the schedule instead it'll just have the schedule title and it will link to regulations.gov that is actually not a change the old notices for years have been linking to regulations.gov what is new however is that on regulations.gov we will be posting the schedule and the appraisal memo at the same time on regulations.gov any member of the public can read it and there's a comment now button which I'll show you later in a screenshot where they can make comments directly on regulations.gov those comments will be posted on there and we will be intaking all comments during a 45-day comment period and then we will intake those comments and review analyze them work with the agencies to answer them and then we will be posting what we're calling a consolidated reply which you can see from it's common terminology used by other agencies as well that will address the comments and state what our proposed resolution is and then that will be a final decision and we will be moving forward on signing the schedule so what is not changing in this so overall the goal of the public comment process there's multiple goals one it's required by statute but more importantly it's a chance for the public to have an opportunity to comment on proposed destruction of federal records and the goal has always been to address all substantive comments and I'll talk a little bit about what might not be substantive comments and what might be but that's the overall goal and that overall goal is not changing we also NARA handles the comment adjudication process and that part is not changing as an agency you may not be aware at all of comments we may have received if there's something we can answer in-house without going back to you if we do have to go back to you and many of you may have experienced that we still handle determining which ones to go back to an agency to talk about how to frame up the answers and we're the ones who interact with the public on it so as I note too as before NARA may involve you in it we spend a great deal of time analyzing the comments when they come in and what we do is we reach back to the agency if there's questions we can't answer if we need to make additional appraisal visits or if we need to discuss possible changes to the schedule that's what we did before and we will continue to do that what I wanted to do before I talk a little bit more about the type of comments we receive is just put up a couple screenshots of regulations.gov so you can see how this will work right now we have two rounds that have been posted some of you may have some schedules in them so we posted them back in March the first one closes in late April to comments and you can see that to the right of each schedule is a button where somebody can comment and it also states when the comments are due this was the second round that was posted we did a round of about a dozen and then another round of a dozen there will be a third register posted this week with closer to 20 and then following on the heels of that will be another one in a week or two and that will have caught us up to all the ones that hadn't been done during the shutdown and as we were gearing up to make this change in late fall so that gives you a sample of one of the screenshots and everyone is funneled through a common comment form if any of you as private citizens or in your capacity have ever commented on anything on regulations.gov you'll be familiar with this format it's a standard format where requesters provide their information their comments and can also upload attachments those are usually public interest groups or state governments or others who may want to put it on their letterhead who may attach more formal written comments even though a first and last name is required there is no identification verification or profile that's required to be set up so someone can comment anonymously even if they need to fill those fields out and here's a comment from another agency just to give you a flavor of how a comment may look when posted as of this morning we have no comments yet received on the two rounds that have already been published the roughly 20 plus schedules that are up there already so we can't show you one of ours because we haven't seen one yet and another thing to know is that there's a lot of capability in regulations.gov for signing up for email alerts and that can be for all NARA postings for ones just for your specific schedule if you were interested in doing that you can go on to regulations.gov you can see the sign up for email alerts to my mind for you as an agency it's a little bit like overwatching your TSP balance you really probably don't want to necessarily sign up for alerts and be watching every little thing that comes in since we intake them all analyze them and come back to you however you are absolutely free to do so if you choose to do that for each schedule or for all NARA schedules or all schedules that are posted as I mentioned this is the public comments required by U.S. Code and it's also governed by the Administrative Procedure Act so we have a lot of rules to follow guidelines our posting period is 45 days and it will run 45 days for all and they will the comment period will end when that 45 days is ended we also have to be very careful to address all comments and keep a written record of them we put them in the dossiers with the other parts of the schedule so we also frequently consult with our legal staff to make sure we are operating within the bounds of the Administrative Procedure Act there have been several lawsuits recently involving records management and other agencies and often they are brought under the Administrative Procedure Act so I wanted to talk a little bit about before I talk about why we're changing now I wanted to talk a little bit about the type of comments we receive and how we handle them we receive historically and I've got some statistics later not that many comments on schedules although it's growing and they traditionally have been very focused on the records themselves the dispositions and increasingly we're seeing a wider variety of comments and a lot of comments that I would consider to be out of scope comments so for instance an in scope comment may be someone may suggest that a record series should be permanent instead of temporary for whatever reason they may have that's what I would call a classic comment from the Federal Register increasingly over the last several years we have seen more and more comments on temporary records and often not to necessarily make them permanent but to extend retention periods that's a fairly recent phenomenon if you go back to the 90s we received no comments I would say on lengthening retention periods it was pretty rare and that's becoming increasingly common those types of comments are ones that we would consider actionable and ones that we would talk to the agency and look at the reasons why and pursue potentially changing the record schedule we have increasingly been getting what I would consider out of scope comments that may be things like agency X should be abolished or the head of agency X should be fired more of a political nature and whatnot and that is a growing trend across regulations.gov that's not unique to us in the record schedules so those are the type of comments that we would consider out of scope and going back to our consolidated reply where we will be replying to all the comments there will be a category for out of scope comments so we will make a nod to those and just note that they are out of scope the more substantive comments let's go back to lengthening a retention period let's say somebody and this is purely hypothetical suggests that a retention period should be lengthened because in various states across the U.S. the ability to file a lawsuit is longer as the statute of limitations is longer therefore even though these are federal records they may play into that so therefore the retention period needs to be extended by five years that's a highly actionable substantive comment we would talk to the agency bring their legal counsel in talk to our legal counsel and there may be some good reasons to change the schedule in a case like that in our consolidated reply let's say all parties decided we should change it in lengthening the retention period by five we would discuss that in the consolidated reply state that that was our intention to do that we would have the agency on board with that before we posted that consolidated reply and then we might reference the other out of scope comments we received and you know just kind of make a note to them one of the other classic I wouldn't call it out of scope but it's what I would consider unactionable we get a lot of comments recently about how every single record that agency X produces must be saved we do not go to an agency and start discussing how we might take in all of the records including their you know time and attendance records and whatnot we don't consider it out of scope because it's a records question however we don't really engage in discussions about really are we going to take this you know agency that is 25,000 employees taking all the records permanently forever again we will mention it in a consolidated reply however we will have some standard language talking about the importance of records management as a way of addressing that comment so you may wonder why we're changing now you know we had a process that some people may have felt worked just fine but we felt for a variety of reasons it was important to change this process one is the enhanced capabilities of regulations.gov we had in the process of modernizing this process and moving away solely from email we did look at other potential options posting it on our website there are some other agency third-party providers for hosting sites for intaking comments what we discovered was regulations.gov was kind of changed some of their capabilities where we were able to post each of the schedules post the schedules in batches as opposed to separate dockets which drives down both our administrative costs and our real cost of what we would need to pay regulations.gov to host all those schedules we processed roughly four to five hundred schedules a year so being able to batch them and save on both the again the administrative costs and the real costs proved to be useful and regulations.gov had enhanced a few capabilities that allowed us to do that while we were examining other options over the last year also there is a growing public interest in record schedules you can pick up the paper virtually any day crack open you know any online media source and if you spend more than a few minutes looking you will find some article where they're at the foundation of it may be some records issue either someone's complaining that someone's not creating records or they're throwing them away or the records are used as evidence in a lawsuit or complaint or something it's really quite foundational and more and more members of the public and public interest groups have clued into this and are realizing the connection which on the one hand is great because it really highlights the importance of records management and what all of us here in this room are doing you know the other side of that is is that we may see an increase in comments we have in general and we may once we you know continue to post these on regulations.gov however you know NARA and the government has an interest in transparency and being more transparent in our decision making there were a lot of requests from from the public to move to an online posting of the schedules and move away from having people you know may I please have a copy of the schedule on the appraisal during this time we were already looking at our various options and you all know how it is in the government when you're exploring various options it can take a little time to do that we had a lot of requirements to look at we have a lot of administrative things on the back end that aren't necessarily apparent to users so we that dovetailed nicely people were requesting it right as we were about to make that transition regardless so another reason is you know I mentioned increasing public interest there has been a steady rise in the percentage of schedules that were requested under the old process and in FY 14 about roughly 40 percent of the schedules were requested by FY 18 that had risen to about 73 percent so virtually all schedules were being asked for anyway so obviously proactively disclosing them in advance is to everyone's advantage and interestingly during this rise in the increase of requests the the percentage of schedules commented on has remained relatively steady only about four to five percent of schedules receive comments if you go poking around on our schedule regulations.gov you will see a lot a lot of schedules covering very often mundane records you know federal government's vast it's complex there's records all across it a lot of them just aren't going to elicit public interest and from those over the last few years about one percent of them end up being changed as a result and it's ranged from lengthening retention periods to sometimes clarifying item descriptions that's that's a little more rare and I'm hesitant to say any any have been moved to the permanent category off the top of my head but I there may have been some but it's so we spend a lot of time and we treat each comment very seriously whether it comes from an individual or a public interest group or a state government but in the end and sorting through we often find that the right decisions were made initially and the schedule often remains unchanged what impact might this have on you you know as I mentioned we just moved to this process in March we've posted two batches and with the third coming and you know there may be more comments on schedules it's hard to say we haven't seen it yet although the first batch has till the end of April before the comment period expires so that remains to be seen I think the overall effect on the time to process record schedules again is a bit of an unknown quantity we've experienced some efficiencies in moving to this process on our end that may be reflected in faster processing times if we receive many many more comments that might might balance out it just remains to be seen however you know in general we're we're modernizing this process and it's in line with other records management goals of modernizing processes so I think overall it's I think it's a positive benefit for both agencies and the public and also given that it's more open and transparent we're hoping over time to you know have the public have a greater comfort level with the notion that federal records are in fact often appraised as temporary the bulk of them are and they're eventually destroyed we are seeing a lot a lot a lot of people who this is a very disturbing concept to them that any federal records are destroyed clearly people aren't aware of of the the staggering volumes of federal records however we have been educating more and reaching out to public interest groups and various user groups more on that front and we hope over time that that will that will improve and also I did want it's not in here but I did want to make a note that we are as part of that outreach in late May we are doing a webinar for the commenting public and it was mentioned in the archivist blog post last week and you will see it in records express blog while anyone can dial in up to a thousand people and I'd be really shocked if we had a thousand people dialing in to hear about commenting on record schedules however I just want to make the point that it really is aimed at the commenting public I'm here today to talk to you all as federal agencies I'll be at the after bridge meetings and you can contact me anytime or your appraiser about it so our our goal there is to work and try to educate as many of the the user groups some of the library groups the archival groups the public interest groups and any other members of the public who happen to see it about the need to schedule records we'll have a brief bit about that and the role of public comments and hopefully you know talk a little bit about steering people towards the more substantive actionable comments that we can really hope to try to address and work through so again that's in late May and we will will be part of our larger effort to help educate the public so with that I'm happy to take any questions about this hi Rich if a commenter directs a question directly to the agency they look up the agency and send it to the agency what should the agency do what the agency so the question was what if a commenter goes straight to the agency in my experience when they do that they usually hit both NARA and the agency so we already have the comment but let's say they don't the agency would need to direct the individual to NARA to regulations.gov the comment will not be taken unless it's handled through the proper channels we're tightening up on a lot of that that's part of the modernizing is tightening up on all those rules of surrounding it and the goal of that is to make it more efficient but it's also to make it more fair so that everyone's treated equally in the process any other questions about it nope any online questions all right I will turn it over to our training director good morning everyone for those of you who may not know me I'm Gary Ralfus I'm the director of records management training and I just wanted to give you a little bit of update as we go through this major transition year for both you and us regarding records management training on where we are at and building some of this stuff and then a few reminders of what changes here at the end of this fiscal year that has a significant impact on you all so many of you will have seen this slide before I am excited because it's mostly green these days so in our new curriculum that we've been building there are three levels just as a reminder the bottom level for custodians is that day-to-day office work that many folks do middle level those liaisons that often serve out in your field locations as overseeing records management in a building or a number of field locations and then obviously the top tier targeted to those agency records officers so we finished the last pilot course for the second tier in February so it is done and we are pretty well through the analysis and design for the third level so we will start running pilots I'll show you a slide scheduled for the third level in May and are on track to finish this probably all the development by September maybe early October and then the last pilot in November for the third level little delay there obviously we had a few days that we couldn't work on it there so we had to back things up and with that we'll also continue to work on building pretests so a big change that will come with this for new records officers is instead of being forced through all the courses our goal is to try to assess what you already know up front and only make you take the things that you did not pass that test for so again what's the end state a set of skills and knowledge for records officers and let's only make you take the training that fills the gaps that you currently have rather than sitting through everything beyond what you see in this little chart there's a whole bunch of other elective content that we'll be getting be working on as we free up resources to do that and then obviously we've got some some branding some policy issues to go with this last Friday I sent Lawrence the latest draft of the policy that will go with this program so I think we're in a good shape to work that through internally and get that out to you all in the coming months too so everything is on track for this a little bit deeper dive so here are the courses that sit at each level probably no surprises in the titles here the one change you see though is at the third level where we've really focused on a little different areas than the life cycle all right so specifically building a course about how to write record schedules how to apply the general record schedule building a course about maintaining and running a records management program right and then also a much greater focus on electronic records management for you all as records officers with this we've started to lay this out in more detail now in a way that we think we can share some of this so if you want to see the next level down what topics are in each course what are some of the things that you've built that I might want to think about we're using if you would send an email this is just a sample that we can send you this whole chart that basically says hey for this topic here's how we've treated it particularly where you see that self-paced e-learning that's a module of training that you can grab from us and go put in your learning management system in your agency if you want to reuse it so I think they'll be benefit for you at some point of looking at what's the details of what we're building and how potentially can you reuse them as you take on a greater role in running training for your agencies a couple of screenshots another thing you will see is we've tried to focus a lot more in our training now on the application of what's learned not can you tell us back what you were supposed to learn but can you use it so here you see a question about hey this is records from the scenario that you read on the previous screen are they covered by the GRS or not it's not enough that you know there's a GRS it's that you can use it to make decisions about whether or not you need to schedule a record similar here here's a question about hey has somebody else got similar records if I'm writing a record schedule why should I start from nothing when there may be in fact other agencies with similar functions similar missions that have very scheduled similar records they may not be right for you but it's a good starting point to think about what should you do with proposing retention for those records so there's a couple samples of that I want to pause here and say thank you to all of you many of the folks in your agencies have been a big part of getting us this far whether it was talking to you about how you do these different tasks in your agencies or having folks participate in those pilots and getting their feedback to make sense of improvements to the courses as we go and with that I will also ask for some continued help so records officers or folks that do similar things in your agencies to you all here in a few weeks we will kick off a pilot for the record scheduling course right now we've got about 50 volunteers already but we'd love to have you participate in that so you can reach out to Michelle or myself if you want involvement the program management piece we're planning that pilot for sometime in July we will get specific dates out as we get a little closer and then the electronic records management will come in November in terms of kind of time investment the record scheduling we're guessing right now is eight to 12 hours of seat time at the most right so folks that have some experience might go quicker program management probably going to be a little smaller than that so I'm thinking six to eight hours the electronic records management there are roughly 10 tasks in there and so we're still doing the design of those my guess with that that's going to be somewhere in that 16 to 20 hour range as we get a little bit closer we'll give you another update so you can start planning but your feedback as we do these first runs really helps us figure out what did we communicate well what are some minor tweaks we can make that'll make it more usable for you and help people learn better from these products another thing we've been working on is a better way to help you with your all hands training so we built a product last year for the national environment for the arts that meets all of the requirements in the 2017 training bullet and we did this largely with tech space training so there's not a lot of need to have audio re-recorded we can go in and change things very quickly to be specific to your agency like the branding or if you wanted to say hey here are specific examples of permanent records we use all the time I'd like to have noted in there very very quick and easy for us to do that change so if you still have a need for all hands training let me know we'll see if we can work with you on that the other thing we've done is pull in some of that other content from the new curriculum so in this case there was a practice exercise we built for the course at level one about how to identify records and non-records we didn't need to re-create that we just pull that piece of training right in and reuse it here so we can customize this very quickly for you if you've looked at other things we have built and want to use a module from that other curriculum dump it into a product like this this can all go very quickly I can rebrand something like this in about five minutes for you right and then if we look at doing content changes in the text it's all very quick right so again we're trying to think about ways we can give you training products that will help you down the road very quickly very easily now we promised you to put training material online and lo and behold we have gotten that started so if you go to the records managers portion of archives.gov you'll now see that in the training section the first item is a training catalog and it's very at the beginning stage but when you click on that it will take you to a front page that shows all of the knowledge area courses right all those materials are still valuable still good where you see blue text there'll be a hyperlink that takes you to them in fact our screenshot is outdated I took this at the beginning of last week by the end of last week all of the knowledge areas are there except k86 so that is the one that is yet to be posted once you go to that page you'll see you have the participant guide the slides and any handouts for that course all in pdf format if you want the source documents the powerpoint file the word document that was the participant guide please email us all right we have we've run into some serious challenges making those accessible so going pdf was the best solution to get them online and be aware of our requirement to make online materials accessible but we certainly recognize you might want to take that make some modifications to fit whatever your training need is all you need to do is send us an email we will get those transferred over to you in the best way possible last is a reminder this is our last year doing face-to-face training this is our last year training anybody that is not an SAO designated records management officer so you can imagine it's been a demand right now the wait list for many of our classes are in the 80 to 90 range I say this also to beg for your help in one way we're also seeing here in Washington DC a fairly significant increase in the amount of people that don't show up for training so anywhere in the 25 to 30 percent range what we have been telling other folks that are trying to get into training is hey take the risk if you want to if you show up and we have an empty seat we will put you in that class but I would ask all of you that are in touch with the communities in your agencies if your people have been signing up for training please ask them to fulfill their commitment or withdraw soon enough that we can get another person into that seat and not have us wasting those training spaces so we want to try to minimize the no shows if we can lastly if you are a newly designated agency records officer and happen to be here in need training or you are getting that in your agencies just email me directly we will get that person into training we will make space for them even if it means someone else has to be removed from a class list because you're required to get it done it will make sure that happens and then last some planning for you all right so reminder all those folks that you have been signing in NARA for many years to get training we will not be doing that for you anymore starting one October so we're here to help though so as you start thinking about what are the things you might need to ramp up to train those folks in your own agency please give us a call if we can help you will we'll try to make any and all of our training materials available to you in whatever formats we have then that works for you reminder we are not going to train those folks after one October we will run one more knowledge area series because of the government shutdown we'll run that in late October, early November for anyone that is a newly designated records officer at that point that still needs to get their certificate that will be the last run next January we'll start working with the new curriculum so any records officer coming in after that we'll get that all right and then again reminder I'll try not to do this too many times but if you are a new records officer or you're getting one the best way for them to get in training is just email me directly if I go on the website and try to sign up for classes they're just going to go what do I do as they look at these long wait lists that are coming and then I'd ask you to take this back to your agencies a couple of messages to start talking about with internally because when we see your folks come to class still many of them have no idea that they're not going to send people next year to the National Archives to get training still so please start planning how are you going to handle this with your records management communities in your agencies I think there's a little bit sometimes of a communication gap between what you all at your headquarters here and know and what goes on out in the field so if you can help us with that that'd be great and then those folks that have taken training we have seen a lot of this this year too hey I took classes five six years ago I hear the certificates going away wait a second I never took my tests can I take my tests now because I still want the certificate yep you can up until September 15th right we were in our last classes roughly to the middle of September the people in that last batch both here and in Chicago we will give them till the end of September to wrap up their tests obviously they need a little time but for everybody else that did part of it and wants to finish they need to get on with it and they also need to pay attention to their record keeping so we are not going to be producing course completion certificates or the entire certificate for people after September 15th so if you can't get something out of our learning management system and you need it please contact us soon so that we can rectify that for you but we're not going to work backwards after the 15th of September essentially we've got a lot of shutting down of accounts to do so that we can do the cost savings associated with some of these changes so we want to serve you the best we can but there are some limits on what we're going to be able to do after that date for you okay so let me pause there take a couple of quick questions and then see what goes on with the rest here so Jim I see it looks like you'd have one yeah Gary I have one question from online have any of the training products completed any 508 compliance certification so we have been doing 508 along the way with the new stuff so as we've been building the templates we've been working with our contractor to make sure each of those screen templates is 508 compliant in and of itself so to the best of our knowledge at this point we are building compliant coursework all right other questions yes hey Gary the same again on your first note say start planning for how your agency office will train RM staff or those designated RM staff or people that's collateraly doing records management for the office so I'm going to repeat your question just to make sure it went through the system to the folks online so the question was for the for the training are we referring to designated records management professionals in the agency for that training or anybody in that agency and my answer is yes right so as agency records officers you have the responsibility for training records management in your agencies whether that be all employees or the staff that you consider part of your records management community or professionals in your agency so that applies all the way across the board from every employee contractor that needs that basic records management piece up to whatever your records management program staff are that need deeper knowledge about what they're doing with records so I'm going back to three slides are you going to put in a customer engagement slide deck in there for training agency records officer how to train other people you know what let me stop flipping around because I'll answer it's not the piece on how to do training is at the second tier of the curriculum but there is stuff in there if you were to if you were to get that whole excel sheet from me you'll see that it's there it's already built in about how do you plan for training and build it and in fact I will call out and thank our folks from the Library of Congress who had a big hand in helping us build out that particular module other questions yes here Donna those of us that have been RM for a long time and have certificates that have been predated to your disposition schedules of training records do we need to do retesting to get new certificates before this period expires or are those going to be continually available so I don't want to get too far ahead of the policy till it warrants tells me it's approved I will say we are going to make a very distinct difference between the current certificate of federal workers management training and the new program it will have a different title intentionally to separate out what are the requirements for this thing going forward that apply to designated agency records officers without having any impact on anybody in the past that has achieved the certificate under the current program does that help answer it I know I'm being a little bit vague because I don't want to set a policy that hasn't been approved today okay hey Gary I've got another one from online while we're waiting have you talked to ICRM and other organizations to get these courses pre-approved for continuing education credits we have not that would not be in our role I think that's a question for the professional organizations to make determinations about I will say in particular the ICRM early on they asked for us to share what we could about the direction we were going with the new curriculum and they built the entire federal track of the new ICRM around our curriculum design that we had at that point in time so in many ways those two things are in sync how they will determine equivalent credit is really up to them okay I'm going to step off now turn it back over to Lawrence and then be happy to take any other questions that come up either during a break at launch or I'll be around a little bit this afternoon too if other things come up thanks Gary a lot of good information there and a lot of changes going on and training for you all to be aware of and some some really good things coming as far as the content that's going to be available online so as I mentioned at the outset I'm going to pretend to be Don Rosen who is on spring break just a couple of quick updates on the reporting period so hopefully it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone but the reporting period closes actually that's incorrect it closes on the 19th not today today would be tax day and maybe you know Don was doing the slides he was thinking I got to get my taxes done the reporting period closes this Friday so what we need to hear from you is or receive from you is either your email report rmsa and say arm reports by Friday or get in touch with us if you need an extension we're certainly sensitive to the fact that this has been it's been a challenging year so we had the shutdown we were supposed to open the reporting period in the beginning of January and we had to compress the time frame a bit so that we could release the reporting period or the reports from the reporting period before the end of the fiscal year so we are aware of that I hope that you all have made progress and are able to submit your reports by Friday but if not please let us know to the email address that's at the bottom of the slide where you are if you do need an extension we're certainly happy to talk to you about that so I mentioned the three reports that are due there are word and PDF versions of the templates so you should have that if you need anything to help you complete the reporting just email us at rmselfassessmentnara.gov and if there are any changes to your contact information if you didn't receive anything then you also need to let us know so that we can make sure you have what you need which hopefully you've already done considering that the reporting period ends Friday so any questions about reporting that's good that's what I want to see everyone's got it covered right okay what did I just do Jim ah there we go all right so it's when I'm going to bring up Lisa Harrell-Lampus to talk to you about digitization regulations thank you very much my name is Lisa Harrell-Lampus and I'm the director of the National Archives records management policy and outreach program and I feel like I feel like we should all just take a deep breath and pause because we have hit you with so much information today you're really getting a sense of all of the programs and records management and how they work together from hearing about scheduling to training to oversight to our colleagues in the federal record center program but there's one more thing to cover before we finish today and that is some of the latest information I have to share on the digitization regulation all right the good news is you're hearing probably for the first time today that NARA has published our digitization rule it went live in the federal register it is on April 10th so just last Wednesday it went out in fact I wouldn't be surprised if my timing works if Murphy's law works right you're probably getting a communication about it via AC memo by the time we're done with bridge today because we were trying to get that out today or sometime this afternoon so you can look for more information in that AC memo or you can find more information right now I recognize that many of our bridge participants are online so I'm waiting a few minutes if anybody wants to check out those links so they can actually see what I'm about to talk about we've posted them both on the federal register and on regulations.gov both those sites have the same content one was a shorter URL so if anybody was typing it in I thought I'd share both the regulation that we're specifically talking about is 36 code of federal regulations sub chapter 12 part 12 chapter 12 sub chapter B part 12 36 for 12 36 for those of you who know that's where electronic records management standards and regulations are and we have created a new sub part within that part and it is sub part D for digitizing temporary federal records we followed the normal regulations process in developing this you first may have seen this digitization regulation back on September 10th that was when we posted it on the federal register and on regulations.gov for public comment so we had gone through the entire process we posted it in September we received a number of public comments I think was about 20 comments or so and we worked on adjudicating those trying to get answers to the questions trying to make sure what we said was clearer we were able to publish it in the federal register as I said on the 10th it will actually be effective there's a 30-day waiting period for one last chance for Congress to decide if they want to change something and that regulates this part will be effective on March 10th and how did we get here why are we here just as a reminder when the federal records act amendments were updated in 2014 one of the requirements in that and I'm going to make sure I read it correctly here on my notes one of the requirements was at NARA promulgate regulations establishing standards for the reproduction of records by photographic microphotographic or digital processes with a view to the disposal of the original records so in other words the law said issue your digitization standards and do it via regulation so that's what we've done so what are the standards and how do they look like or what do they look like because I knew I was giving to this year this is a preview this is the premiere party of the digitization regulation I thought it would make sense just to copy and we're going to go through the full text of the next three parts of this digitization regulation there's a little bit you know there's a little bit of warm up for those of you who want to go back and read the full thing but basically this part 32 12 36 32 contains the five items that are for the digit that contain the digitization standards I'm not going to read these line by line I'm just going to provide some commentary while you have a chance to look them over the first commentary as I see as you're looking at this you're saying these are not very technical these are very high level and that was done on purpose when we were conceiving the plan of how we're going to handle digitization regulations and digitization standards we went and used and the clue is in the the language I just read to you we went and used the micro graphic standards that are contained in CFR part 12 1238 so 1238 had micro graphic standards those were written back in the 50s and 60s but that was where you start start looking what have we done in the past how can we what can we learn what can we leverage and we noticed that in the past they had a very high level standard for micro graphing temporary records and a very detailed technical standard for doing micro graphics for permanent records so we are going down that same path we have a very high level standard for temporary records and we're going to have a very detailed standard for permanent records the crux of the micro graphic standard and the part that I like the most for me one of the keys to these five standards is item number C that says you must an agency must ensure they can use the digitized versions for all of the purposes that the original source records served including have an ability to attest to transactions and activities in the micro graphics they sort of talked about 99 years and lower we don't get into that here with this regulation for all temporary records once they're digitized can they serve the original purpose and the reason I like this is because it helps me answer the questions on the other parts of the standards for example let's just take an example here part A says capture all information and we've left that high level so the agencies have the flexibility to term what information they needed but again how do you know the answer to that question what information did I need well what information did you have on the originals and let's take something very specific a concrete example of dates dates piece of information well what date did you need on the originals did you need the date of the document the date of action on the document the date the document was closed will you need to know the date the document was scanned these are all the parts of information that you might want to look at when scanning and creating metadata and indexing for dates and the question is well what did you need with the originals and can what dates do I need to capture so it can still serve the same purpose as those originals the pages and parts part of the standard has a similar example so you're scanning do I have to scan the front page and the back page what are the standards require looking at item C they have to serve the same purpose did I need to know information on the front and on the back when I had originals then yes I would have to scan both pages when I'm scanning and our colleague Dave Miller talked about document processing and you might say well I actually saved the envelope I had a sticky I had a note card and I put all those things together with a paperclip and I saved that entire letter with every part that was associated with it well why did you save it if you saved it because all of it had meaning and information that was needed to do your business then you would have to scan all those pages and parts to meet your business if it turned out you just had a straight row of correspondence and there was never anything on the back well then you could talk about I've captured all the information and all the parts the back was always blank but wasn't necessary for me to scan so again it's an example that the standards themselves are constructed to be very high level and very flexible to account for the wide variety of digitization projects and activities that happen within the federal government okay those are the standards I'm going to say this on the end of every slide if you have questions which I'll be happy to take now if you want some time to think about the questions and come up with some more specifics you can send questions to a c p s that is the name that is the acronym the organization of the unit that's responsible for this the records management policy and standards team so a c p s at narra.gov you can send questions there or you can send them to me at lisa.herralampus at narra.gov so I'm just giving you that before we move on to the next slide which is I've scanned I've gone to standards what's next next is the validation and again we didn't coordinate this but I appreciated hearing Dave's presentation because he sort of outlined some of the steps that he does in digitization scanning services for the record center and you can see how it maps so complementary to the regulations and the policy so you've scanned according to standards what's next the next step is validation which specifically how are you how you must there's two musts and two mays here you must validate to make sure that the scans are of a suitable quality to replace the originals you must do some sort of validation some sort of quality check to make sure the scanning was done well how you do this is a may we have written the regulations to provide again that wide degree of flexibility you can establish your own process if you're using a third party vendor you can document or you can use their processes how you want to validate them is up to you the standard says validate them according to the previous part 32 which is is it complete did you contain all information all pages and parts and those other two items could I find them could I retrieve them am I able to access them over time the next must I said there's two musts one that you must validate and the second must in this part is you must document the validation we're gonna have to start keeping track so that you can attest as it said before attest and verify that the records were scanned successfully so under this regulation we say agencies must document the validation process and retain that documentation for the life of the records that were digitized or the digitization process whichever is longer I will say at this point we are going to be providing more guidance via the general record schedules that specifically relate to the disposition authority that is the concepts are outlined in the regulation and GRS will be coming soon to talk about that a little bit further when we adjudicated those 20 comments one of the comments and questions we got was so this validation documentation that you mentioned in the proposed rule is NARA gonna approve that does NARA need to do an approval of validation processes and the answer was no we are not planning to do any approvals or certifications we're not running a digitization certification process as we answered that question we said the one thing that we may need is we may need at some point to review documentation there's a wide variety and you've heard all of our colleagues talk about it today about oversight or even appraisal in the future or even some other way that NARA may be looking for we would like to reserve the right to review validation documentation but we're just that's a May that we wanted to have in the future it's not a must that's required now okay so I've talked about standards I said here's the standards to follow here's some information some regulations on validation so that you know you follow those standards big question is can I now dispose of the temporary original source records and section 36 of the new regs covers disposal of original source records by the way I'm gonna say that throughout this entire discussion here for the next 15 minutes that's our new term of art original source records we talked about originals and we talked about source and then we realized there was some confusion over time so now we've just tried to be really clear that once you digitize records you what you have with the paper the things that were digit or the analog whatever was digitized those are the original source records the commentary I would make is they are not non-record reference copies in the way that this regulation is written there may be other exceptions again we can talk about it but the way this regulation was written there's an assumption that the reason you are digitizing is because you want that information in a new format in a new way to do some business need for your agency and so you are going to have the original source materials that was the originals the paper copies and now you have your digitized versions what is the authority to get rid or to eventually dispose of both those sets of records the authority for the original source records now that you've scanned them and validated them is currently GRS 5.2 intermediary records or you may have an agency specific schedule because the scheduling process went through there was planning of we're going to have two different versions I need this set for this long and this set for that long so you have an authority currently that you could use I've checked the standards I validated and I have an authority that I can now use to destroy the original source records the scheduled disposition for the digitized version is now what they were originally scheduled as because the digitized version is now serving the same purpose as the originals that's now the record keeping copy that will now have to be maintained managed until its disposition time frame is over a couple other notes I wanted to make sure this is a very new topic so I'm actually going to double check put on my glasses and make sure I'm hitting all the notes I wanted to hit on this first preview of these records oh some eight questions we had were will agencies now that we've issued this and I've done digitization in the past do I have to rescan my records what do I do if the standards I had in the past don't meet the standards in this regulation and the answer is that agencies may need to assess their prior digitization work and if they are generally not compliant with this regulation you may need to retain the original source records or decide whether or not you would want to rescan them so the reason I wanted to go through this process was wait a minute rescan my records and the answer was generally non-compliant with those standards which if you think about them they were very high level and they were very flexible so it's a bit of an exercise to determine have I captured all the information the parts am I able to retrieve them am I able to attest that these are indeed the records I've got do I have any validation information of what I did and how I did it if so you would generally not have to rescan that was not the effort but we wanted to put out that warning that if you think you are not compliant with these regulations there are some things we're going to have to talk about about what the agency may or may not need to do item C was also the same question we received about validation we received about disposition is an agency going to need NARA's approval to destroy scheduled temporary records that have been digitized according to this part and we wanted to make it very clear so we put it right in the regulation item C no no NARA approval or authority is needed because we have stated what the regulations are we've explained the validation it is agencies now have the authority we are we are not setting up a NARA certification validation accreditation process for digitization okay those were the big deep breaths first it was the standards then it was the validation then it was the disposal what's next and the answer is well that was actually it as far as the regulations go what's next from the perspective of of our office and our program which focuses on guidance and policy and products we do have many a couple more things in the works the biggest thing the one of the top priorities for our team right now is regulations for digitizing the permanent records those are going to be the far more technical detailed standards as one would have seen in the micrographics we are basing those standards on and once again I'm going to read this to make sure I get it precisely correctly we are basing our draft regulations on the federal agency digital guidelines initiative which is FADGI on their technical guidelines for digitizing cultural heritage materials creation of raster image files 2016 we are also using a metadata standard which is and I'm going to say this out loud for those of you who are online and using the the reader the metadata standard is A-N-S-I-ANSI N-I-S-O-ANSI NISO Z-39.87 2006 that's the citation the plain language name for that is the data dictionary the technical metadata for digital still images so those two products are what we're planning to base the permanent standards on and I've been sharing that information over and over so if folks want to know will my digitization practices that are currently mapped to standards that are going to be proposed that's what we're using to base it on however I cannot answer the question of if I meet that I will comply with the future standards because they are future standards and they haven't been they haven't gone through the process yet we are hopeful that this standards will be out for interagency review we can get them developed get them through our internal reviews get them over to OMB and have their blessing they should be going out for interagency review in the early fall if we get that done properly we're looking at public comment again in three to six months three months after that I should say it shouldn't be six months so they are going to be coming once that process is done and we go through the whole regulations path we'll then be able to answer the question of what did my what are we actually saying for digitization regulations more guidance is going to be coming I said it once already and I'm going to say it again we are looking at updates to the general record schedule with our general record schedule team our goal is clarity and consistency so we have the intermediary records 5.2 that's a valid schedule right now we would like to look at some tweaks or some updates to help make it really clear original source records our intermediary records to make it really clear the disposal instruction to be offer that clarity on the validation documentation so again that process it will come out it's a three to six month process for GRS updates so our hope is that by 2020 we'll have all of our pieces in line and they will all complement each other we are also looking at our current media neutral notification process and we are also looking at requests for exceptions so for permanent records that are coming to the National Archives do and I'm just I'm don't know if digitization is going to work what when an exception be and my comment now is that all of these pieces have to fit together like a puzzle and that is why we are looking at all of those processes concurrently so we've successfully done the the temporary records digitization standard regulation we're hip deep in the permanent regulation records regulation and we're considering what changes to make to media neutral and what we might do for exceptions but we don't have any further guidance to share at this time other than we're trying to make sure they're all consistent and then they meet NARA's strategic plan and the president's reform plan of trying to get to digitize government by 2022 as far as transferring records to NARA is concerned the last piece I wanted to highlight for you now because I'm hoping you'll see it within the next three months or so is a digitization cost benefit analysis paper our colleagues who work on the federal records management council the FMRMC which is a council sponsored by NARA have been looking at digitization also from the perspective of agencies and where they and where their cost benefit analysis that they do when they determine when to undertake a digitization project they have delivered a paper and we hope to be able to share that for agencies as well I think it's some of the things you have to think about when you're digitizing it's going to describe the benefits risks and challenges of digitization it's going to talk about considerations for whether digitization is a viable option and it's meant to provide some practical support of the business decision of when to or not digitize and by practical support in mean a price chart and some tools some calculation tools to sort of help you determine well if I'm going to digitize how many boxes do I have what might that look like and what would the cost be so hopefully we'll have that paper also it is a it is a paper but I put it under as a guidance product for here for us because it's some more information we can share about digitization the better so those are the products that are coming up next I'd like to pause let's everybody else has done at the end of the presentation and again say does anybody have any questions about the information I've just shared so far and I'll remind you that there's also ACPS at narra.gov we've got a couple questions in the audience hey Lisa while we're waiting I just want to let you know the AC memo was received by people right as you started talking see I took Murphy's law that's how it happens I was hoping to be able to say oh this went out and that's real time talk about a real time presentation today I had been concerned I was going to have to tell you a status update and now I'm so pleased to be able to share this concrete information good morning I'm Lynette Cosby from CMS and I wanted to know if you had a or if you can make available a sample validation policy or best practices for that kind of policy and also with the validation documentation yes that is a great question we are definitely hoping to have best practices and examples of what validation documentation can look like again the beauty of the way we'd like what we'd like to do is have a repository of things for people to look at that cover a variety of different types of validation products we are looking at that that's one of the products we'd like to do we're also hoping that we might be able to get information that's just shared because people have been doing a lot of digitization for a long time so it shouldn't be hard to now the standards are out start collecting and sharing that information amongst the federal records community but yeah thank you yes morning Lisa Troy energy the questions with regards to 1236 36C when NARA issued some guidance I think it was December 2007 everything after records control wise was media neutral does this regulation effectively push it all the way back to the beginning of time for temporary records because if you choose on the media specific paper to digitize it by default becomes mean and neutral there's a lot to unpack on that question Troy because I think you're asking a scheduling question about what is the scheduling authority which we issued back in 2007 the piece we were missing was the digitization standard part could you restate your question again because I don't think I followed it prior to December 2007 let's say 2000 something media specific it's not written as media neutral if you now choose to apply these this regulation to it and digitize it and follow this you now can get rid of the paper even though it was specific correct so yes thank you for restating that and helping me follow through the logic that was the intention with the standard and I'm going to trust my colleagues will help me on stage if I've it's a very complicated point to get across but that was the point with the digitization standards now that we have the standards and the validation in peace as I said in the beginning there's an assumption that the reason you're digitizing is because you wanted to replace the old series exactly with the new digitized versions therefore if you've met the standards and validated the digital versions are now the record keeping copy and they have to hit that schedule whatever it once was so it's like media neutral like you know I even hesitate to say I don't want to say media neutral knowing that there might be questions about it I'll just try to be very specific and say therefore the digitized versions the record keeping copy has to be maintained according to that scheduled item and the paper versions I say paper versions a shorthand the paper versions can now be disposed of as intermediary records so you have a schedule for the paper copy and your existing schedule is now the schedule for the electronic okay thank you whether it was media neutral or not that's a great question and I am sure that is a question we're going to get many times with the AC memo that just went live we are creating an FAQ page on our website for frequently asked questions we knew we were going to be getting a lot of questions and we wanted to have a place where we could park them so people can see fully vetted appropriate responsive answers so keep in mind that the AC memo there will also be an FAQ yes my name is Andrea Jenkins I'm from USDA rural development so my question is we have to have all of our permanent records managed by the end of this year we have a lot of permanent records that are hard copy that we want to scan digitize but you're not going to have that reg out so we've talked about sending over the original hard copies but they don't want to let them go so we're stuck between a rock and a hard place on non-digital permanent records right what should we do I've heard a lot of shorthand in that question and I'm going to repeat it back to you so that we can in the long hand form which is you've got permanent records that have to be managed by the end of this year I'm assuming you're referring to the 2019 goal yes within the managing government directive that will point out again I'm sorry not again that sounded I will point out as we've been saying over and over again that the 2019 goal was for managing permanent electronic records in electronic format it was please do not print and file things that were born electronically or born digitally right so it's a little different that's saying what do I do with the permanent paper records okay with the permanent paper records according to the new NARA strategic plan goal we said look come 2022 we are planning to the fullest extent possible and that is I always want to say to the greatest because it's it's been pushed farther and farther as we get clarity on what that means that those paper records could not be sent to us as a direct offer post 2022 to the greatest extent possible which means it could go and that's what you're like I could send this but they don't want to the long form is I could send it to a national archives federal record center program because if it's in the federal record center program by 2022 then digitization would not be required there is that specific statement in those plans so I will use this opportunity once again say please consider for older records that are not an active use but are still in your agency custody if you really thought digitization is not the solution please consider transferring them to a federal record center before 2022 so again you are in a rock and a hard place because they're paper they don't want to be sent but how am I going to scan them I would say there is a little time from the 2019 deadline because the 2019 deadline doesn't say scan by 2019 it says managing permanent electronic records by 2019 so there is some time and I would also say for the scanning plans that you're doing you could use those two standards as a thought piece of where to go and start looking at that level of scanning for some of the particulars and you know what do I what do I have to do to test equipment what do I have to do to what are the parameters that are going to be used because you'll have an idea of where we're heading so you're not you're not developing requirements in the dark completely all right thank you hey Lisa we have a question from online will NARA take delivery of long-term electronic temporary records long-term temporary electronic records to our federal record center programs is what I would assume would be the answer because it wouldn't take them to the national archives and I am going to look for help on that question because I know they're it's like Gordon would you take the microphone to help answer that question and the reason I will and look for help is because I know it's important that we be precise and accurate and I had an idea yeah thank you right yeah there are two two questions here I think it is if there is a a a bunch of electronic records and do we have the capacity to store a bunch of electronic records we do not however we do have customers who may have CDs or those things and they may put them in a box situation which they'll need to talk to a record center about any analog records will take in before 2022 but again we would probably have to talk to our center because if you're talking you know bunches and bunches of the CDs or tapes that could be an issue and we should have that discussion before you do that yeah the way I was going to respond is there's a difference between taking in media like boxes and CDs or thumb drives or yeah we don't have a server farm set up in our reference center program obviously we won't do that at all to do that but I know sometimes things end up in boxes so thank you for that very for the correct answer some more questions hey Lisa we got one more from online Patty Stockman from NASA is asking will Norris please streamline their process for dealing with agency schedules for permanent records approved prior to 2007 so that we may transfer digitized permanent records to the archives under those schedules so there are some scheduling issues that are preventing the transfer going forward I say Patty we will do our best to work with you that's all I can say but I appreciate the effort and I'm sure we are fed in contact about that issue before and if you'd like to we can talk about it further offline to figure out what is the specific scheduling issue and the good news is our colleagues Maggie's here so she and I will go talk about that afterwards and figure out what the piece is I will say though that might be part of what we were talking I was talking about before with the media neutral and exceptions how we're trying to make this puzzle fit to support Norris goals we know there's a lot of pieces that have to be put together and to comply with the law thanks Patty one more okay Christopher forning HHS Indian Health Service if I'm correct NARA digitizes records for federal agencies and if you're doing that what is your validation process look like we do offer a digitization service thank goodness all the right people are in the room to have the right questions today and that's what Dave Miller was talking about earlier and they do have a quality control process and I know we talk to them to get insight we develop the regulations so I will let Dave answer is this on hi this is David again yeah we we're very interested in seeing the new regulations about the specifics about the documentation of the validation process because that's something where we don't have a consistent application of now but all the records scanning projects that we do in a production mode for agencies we do have that discussion about what kind of validation we need and what steps we need to document during that process to satisfy you and ourselves but to be honest we don't have a a consistent scheme about what documentation we have in that package in the form that NARA might want to review at some point that's something we'll be closely looking at Dave's specifically talking about the permanent records so if you're scanning permanent records the digitization standards that I mentioned they talk about 100% verification not human that doesn't say human or automated but those are the kinds of parameters that we need to know did you want 100% we want batch checking after scans are done to make sure the equipment's calibrated those are industry standard practices but we have an articulated which for the temporary records which we do scan quite a bit of temporary records we gave that flexibility to determine what validation would be appropriate and that's where some of the control measures that the services that they provide have the flexibility to map to the type of records the cost and the complexity because again if you are just doing a straight run and doesn't require a lot of document prep then there might be some automated tools that would be sufficient which gets back to the original question of could you show us some examples of what types of validation we recognize that the standard and part of the reason why it's so high level is it covers people who are digitizing four boxes and people who are digitizing 40,000 so the length and the difference means that there might be different quality checks that are possible depending on the nature of the project and there's flexibility to determine which works for you those are great questions so as Sammy so you guys have a scanning guideline document on your website for planning these projects that you guys use and it says about the validation of well how you guys validate your scanning process and that you guys could process out to us right so y'all got something out there so I'm going to what that process that document that's about scanning which we've shared information about how the National Archives scans archival holdings the difference is those standards we never throw away the original source records those standards were for the scanning standards that are going to go into our catalog so they don't require the same amount of validation or rigor that we have for the temporary records to use for a testing or for the permanent records that agencies will be scanning and then we will never have the paper we will only have the scans so there's a there yes there's multiple digitization guidance is available and we'll try to help and we use our website to make it clear what the different policies are and what we've used them but I think you're referring to digitization scanners that are on our website that we've shared so when agencies want to scan records they know what they have to uh or when companies who are bidding on NARA scanning projects they can see what the standards are we're using or if we have a partnership with somebody who's I want to scan records they know what uh what standard to use it's the eye to disposal that made this effort a little different so digitization standards with a view to disposal and hopefully that makes people feel comfortable to know the National Archives is not planning to throw away the records that are here at the archives all right with that because this was a very uh rich topic there's a lot to say it's the first time some of you are seeing it so fear not there will be more coming again you can send questions to ACPS at nara.gov and be happy to work through and provide more information and stay tuned I hope to be able to talk about these future projects at free to bridge meetings and now for a little stage craft I would like to invite the members of uh my colleagues who are coming to the panel to start walking that way and coming up and filling the the the stage but for the rest of the audience pay no attention to the activity happening in front of us and instead Jim Stossel is going to come up and talk about our records management website thank you Lisa for those of you who haven't met me my name is Jim Stossel and I do the outreach activities for the records management side of NARA back in October of last year we redid completely the main page of our website so I just we just we've been meaning to show you what we've done since then but haven't had a chance with cancellations and everything so I this is the first opportunity we've had so the first thing I want to show you for people who have don't even know that we have that part of our website because if you go to the main national archives page through archives.gov or you can use NARA.gov and it'll take you to the same place what you have to do from there is scroll completely down to the bottom of the page until you see this little title over here called for records managers and when you click on that you finally end up at the records management part of NARA and this is what we've redone completely we turn the main page into something that we hope is more intuitive for you we divided it into two sections to the main part of the page and then on the right hand side we have the latest news and events that we we are doing we have contacts that are important for you various agency contract contacts within your agencies about records management and then some communities of interest that we are involved in including the FRMC the FRON and the ERMog which is a relatively new one that has an important role to play in digitization standards and things like that so in the main part of the page we've divided it into our main business activities and it corresponds to our offices as well so and in the upper left hand part of the page is some of the important portals that you may need to get to in order to do your records management functions including ARCAS the ERA and you can not only find information about these parts of the of records management in these sites but you can log into them if you actually are going to do work on them and then finally down at the bottom is the Federal Record Center where you can actually look up each of the centers and find information about contacts there and what they actually do over here is scheduling and transfer that's another office here where of course that's the function that they perform scheduling and transfer and on here you can see that you can go to each one of the different scheduling requirements like GRS you can see what about RSC the agency records control schedules you can see information about how to do inventory scheduling and then you can find important contacts as well which is one of the most important things we provide and then the another part of our office is doing oversight and reporting with Don Rosen you can see some of the things that he does and as we get the inspection reports in we actually post them here so you'll be able to access them online and then finally Gary Rockfuss' department with training and education as he showed you a little bit before we're going to populate this with some of the actual records management training courses out of the catalog that you can take now that they're all being provided online and then finally down at the bottom we have two little boxes that contain information of continuing importance such as policy and guidance documents and important topics of the day that that continue on so some older information about email management and then our Federal Electronic Records Modernization Initiative or Fermi that we've been talking a lot about and shared services and some transfer formats guiding I'm sure the digitization guidance will go on there eventually because these are these are items of continuing importance as we go forward so that's pretty much it I hope it's it's a much more usable site for you once you're actually down into the site you can either bookmark it or if you see up here after the archives dot govits slash records dash mgmt so if you haven't been there yet go there we're trying to make it better for you over time and help you connect us with us in in better ways so I don't see the member of the members of the panel yet oh there's a lot very good yes raise your questions are there any questions about the website or access to it or or any information that you haven't been able to find or anything like that I don't see anybody if you have any in the future please contact us through either my my email James dot Stosso at nar dot gov or any of the ones that you find on the webpage did I see a hand okay all right very good I think Jim might be thinking it's April 1st and not April 15th so we didn't clue him in on the timing for the session so I do want to apologize we had a lot of content to share with you today and we were hoping to get through all of the content and still reserve some time for our panel at the end of this session but one thing that I've learned is that you never hold people past lunch on eastern time and I don't want to do that today and bring a panel up here for you to ask questions but then we don't have time to answer them so note to self actually note to Jim for our next meeting in June we will make sure that the the program is a little bit briefer so that we have some time at the end so that we can do the Q&A panel because we've done it before it's been very good for us to hear what all of you think to hear what's on your minds and to have some discussion about what's going on records management across the government so let me we're trying to get to the last slide so we can show you when the next meeting is there you go so June 18th is our next meeting again just reminder for those of you who work with appraisal teams two three and four or you may have questions for Maggie about posting record schedules David Miller is going to be back to talk about digitization for the FRCP please join us upstairs at one o'clock it will be in the Washington and Jefferson rooms so hopefully see you there and at this point it is three minutes to noon so have a great lunch if you're here on the east coast and we will see you next time in June thank you