 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the June bridge meeting. My name is Ariane Ravenbach, and I will be serving as the moderator for today's meeting. As a reminder, the Office of Agency Services at the National Archives and Records Administration hosts these bridge, these bimonthly records and information discussion group, or bridge meetings, to present information relating to federal records management. Bridge is co-produced by the Office of the Chief Records Officer for the United States and the Federal Records Center Program, and is live streamed to the audience via our YouTube channel. Generally, bridge meetings consist of a scheduled program of presentations with an open forum at the end of each meeting to ask questions of the presenters or of any related federal records management topic of interest. Viewers are encouraged to post questions in the chat or by sending an email to rm.communications.nara.gov. Our staff will be monitoring this email box during the meeting. You are also welcome to make comments during this meeting in the YouTube chat. However, keep in mind that all comments are subject to moderation, so we ask that you keep the comments relevant to the topics being discussed. Copies of the presentation slides can be found in the information box below and on the bridge page of the archives website. That webpage is where you will also find links to the transcript of today's meeting when it is available, as well as links and information about previous bridge meetings. If you have any general comments about bridge or suggestions for future topics, you can use that same email address, rm.communications.nara.gov, to pass these along to us. We welcome your feedback. I would like to start today's meeting by introducing Lawrence Brewer, the Chief Records Officer for the U.S. government, to open the meeting. Good morning, Lawrence. Good morning, Ariane, and thank you. So good morning, good afternoon to everyone out there watching Bridge Today. Happy summer and welcome to the June meeting. We have a lot to talk about today and a really interesting agenda, so if we could flip the slide, I'm not going to waste much time kicking things off or walk you through what we're going to get to in our time together. We're going to start with some updates from the Federal Records Center's program. And then I will be back to talk about a few updates from the records management side of the agency. And then we have a couple of other new topics and interesting presentations where Lisa Sandor, as part of the FRCP update, is going to talk about life at the National Personnel Record Center and what they have been doing over the past several months. And then we're going to close with a special panel discussion on capstone from three experts at the National Archives and giving you three different perspectives on capstone email management and how we have been handling it and working it throughout the life cycle. So we have a lot to cover and I know you're going to have a lot of questions and I want to make sure we have all the time that we need to get through that. But I also wanted to note that we always close our meetings with a general Q&A session. So I encourage you to put your questions in the chat as you're listening to panels. But if we do not get to your questions, we will hold them over for the general Q&A and hopefully at the end of the meeting we'll have some time to talk about any questions specific to the panel discussions or previous presenters or anything else that's on your mind before we adjourn. So with that, I want to introduce a special guest, Jay Treanor, the Executive for Agency Services to join us for a couple of remarks and an announcement. Jay, over to you. Thank you, Lawrence. Happy to be here. So as Lawrence said, I'm the Executive for Agency Services, which is NARA's outward facing component to work with federal agencies. About 40% of NARA's staff resides within Agency Services, which is the Information Security Oversight Office, the Office of Government Information Services, the National Declassification Center, and as Ariane said, your host today, the Chief Records Officer and the Federal Records Center's program. Last February, the Director of the FRCP, David Weinberg, retired. And we kind of limped our way through the pandemic like a lot of you. But here in May, we were able to elevate Gordon Everett to become the new director of the program. Gordon's familiar to a lot of you through these bridge meetings and variety of other meetings and engagements that he hosts with the federal customers within the Federal Records Center's program. He's had over 10 years as the Director of our Customer Relationship Management Branch, where he's had to tackle some of the unpopular things like agreements and billings, but he's also gotten to work with all of the customer agencies on projects, initiatives, and other activities. So I'm very much looking forward to working with Gordon and seeing Gordon's leadership of the program that he's been a member of. And I would like to welcome you, Gordon, to your new role and turn it over to you. Okay. All right, thank you very much. And good morning to everyone. And it's great to be with you as the Director of the Federal Records Center program. And as Jay said, many of you have engaged with me over the years and may or may not know me, but you will get an opportunity as we hopefully up one day soon go back to live bridge meetings. I want to just talk briefly and quickly. All of our Federal Records Center programs, I'm happy to say are open. However, we're either in phase one or phase two operation, which still has us with some limited capacity of staff working. But we're still handling any requests you deem as an emergency. We try and make sure we can get in and take care of those requests for our customers. But like all agencies, NARA is really working in completing their reentry plan for our staff to return on site safely. That's not been fully approved or done yet for the Federal Records Center. It's not done. You know, we're getting there. But as always, we'll keep you informed. And once that has been approved, you can expect our services to phase in and hopefully get back to very normal operations. So I'll just leave it at that today. You can, you know, we'll communicate that through a note from myself or the account managers to let you know when we're ready, you know, to get going once these plans are all approved. So with that, are there any questions about the Federal Records Center program that myself or Chris Pinckney may be able to answer for you? I would hope in the next four to six weeks we'll have a little bit more concrete information for you on the operations. Any questions for us, Eric? Hi, Gordon. Yes, we have a couple that have come in. First one, how do I find the FRC emergency contact information for my local records center? That information, we did provide emergency contact information for all of the FRCs to the agency records officer if for any reason someone still needs that. If they can reach out to an account manager or send us an email and we can make sure you have that list, if you have something in the next few weeks that you have an emergency on, you can reach a person within the FRC. We have specific contact people that will work with you on that emergency request. So if you have, reach out to the agency records officer who has that list and if for some reason you can't reach them, reach out to your agency account manager. Thank you, Gordon. The second question that came in is can we submit new records transfer requests to the Federal Records Center program in Arcus? Yes, that still can take place. We have folks who are teleworking who are reviewing requests and approving requests. Obviously, you'd have to work with the specific center in getting a date and time for that request to come into the facility due to the limited resources at this point, but you still can submit your request and they are still being reviewed for approval. We have another one that's come in. Are the FRCs planned to be fully open in calendar year 2022? In calendar year 20, would it be open? Yes, the FRCs will be open in 2022, calendar year 2022. We hope to be fully open before the end of this fiscal year. As I said, we're open, but we're working in phases right now and that could open up a little bit more as we get another few weeks under our belts. And this one has also come in and maybe Lawrence would want to weigh in on this one as well. Since the FRCs have been mostly closed or barely open for more than a year, has there been any recent consideration of extending the December 31st, 2022 deadline for paper record storage? So if you don't mind, Gordon, I knew this question was going to come up and it was actually part of what I was going to talk about when I get to my update. So I'll just cover it now and then we can do follow-up later when I come back to the program. So as I said before, and I've talked to a number of agencies and a number of different forums, we are fully aware of the impact this pandemic has had on all of you, whether you needed to transfer records to an FRC that was closed or needed to get on site to digitize records. Clearly, the pandemic has set us back as a government working towards those 2022 goals. We understand that. We have had a number of conversations within NARA and we are certainly motivated at this point to consider those deadlines and provide some relief and flexibility for agencies going forward. One of the things that I do want to say is nothing has been determined. We are considering where we are with those targets in coordination with our own strategic planning work as most of you and your agencies are also doing your own strategic plan for the next five years. So in coordination with that, we are planning out what the next five years looks like which has to take into account what the new targets need to be. So at this point 2022 is still the deadline. I would encourage you to review NARA Bolton 2020-01 which is the guidance that we released after M19-21 came out which provides information about exceptions or extensions from that goal and those targets. And I would encourage you to do the work now keeping in mind that 2022 is the goal and if we do end up extending the targets, you would still need to do that work and it would just give you a sense of what record series, what processes need to be accounted for if you are going to need an extension. So whether that extension is two years, three years, four years, whatever it is and it hasn't been determined yet, we are still going to need to do that work unless you don't need a multi-year or longer term extension or exception. So that's where we are. It's in process. We're having discussions and we hope to have some more information back to all of you soon. Okay. Thank you very much. We have another question and this one I guess is back to Gordon. When will the FRCs be able to accommodate shipments of pallets of boxes from agencies instead of a few boxes at a time due to reduced staffing at the Federal Records Center programs? Yeah. Go ahead. Did you finish? Yeah. That's basically a question. Yes. Yeah, you know, I have Chris Pinkney, our Director of Operations, is also here on their line, but I would have to say it's going to be after we get additional staff in the facilities able to take on that work. I mean, you know, as we speak today, we still have limited staff in our facilities and the FRCs and we want to make sure we bring our folks back safely, you know, bring those numbers up safely. And once we have that and pretty confident we can operate in a safe manner, you'll be able to send us pallets and not just a few boxes. But I think if you work with your T&D folks at that specific center, and all centers are totally different with the number of resources currently. So make sure you talk to that T&D supervisor or director of that center and they can work with you on those transfers. Okay. I'm just checking one more time. There is a question. It kind of builds off of that one. Is there a process for coordinating transfer of new boxes to the FRC? And I think you've kind of hit on those already. Yeah, that would be with someone at the center, T&D or the center director. Okay. Here's another one. Will the FY 2022 FRCP rates be provided to federal agency customers in fiscal year 2021 quarter four? I'm going to go out on a limb and think that we will have those rates for you sometime in Q4 this year. They have not been finalized. They're going through the review. There's a whole process we go through to make sure the rate establishment is correct or where it should be. And that's not complete yet. But we certainly would do everything we can to make sure you have those in sometime in Q4 and have those all in approved and out to you folks in due time. Thank you, Gordon. I believe that covers all the questions that we have right now. As a reminder to our viewers, please, if you still have questions, put them in the chat. We can get to them in the general session at the end. And I'll turn it back over to you, Gordon. Okay. One of the things I did want to mention, during the pandemic, there were times where we did receive emergency requests involving our veterans. And we had over 100 volunteers from our national personnel records and a staff who came into our facility to volunteer to ensure that we took care of our veterans. There are some number around 59,000 burials, medical emergencies to almost 30,000, dealing with 12,000 plus homeless vets. So we wanted to share some information this morning on that. There were real emergencies that our folks volunteered to make sure that we handled to take care of our veteran folks during this critical time during the pandemic. And we want to thank all of the volunteers on our staff who did come in and do that. Lisa Sandor, who is a manager of our Core One Reference in St. Louis in a Military Personnel Record Center, she's going to take us through that and show us how all that took place. Lisa. Thank you, Gordon. Good morning. I'm happy to be here with you today to discuss NPRC's commitment to our veterans and their family. Next slide. This is a graphic representation of our pre-pandemic. As you can see, it's based on our goal of a 10-day turnaround time. We do receive requests through the mail or online. Our mail room has two days to enter them into our case management system. Our technician has one day to process it. Outgoing mail has another day. The record has to be searched and given to a technician before it goes in the mail. And all that creates a 10-day turnaround. That is our goal. Next slide. Immediately upon having to reduce capacity because of the pandemic, many volunteers came forward and continued coming on site to ensure our veterans and families were served. The number of burial and medical emergency requests never decreased as the pandemic went on. We started out with a backlog of about 56,000 requests, which for us at NPRC is actually works in progress. We moved to phase zero, but we never closed at the beginning of the pandemic. We just moved to working emergency requests only. Unfortunately, our current backlog is over 500,000 requests. We've been in phase two operations since April 5th, and we've been able to expand our emergency request pool from only burials and medical emergencies to also add homeless vets, home loan guarantees, White House requests, congressional requests, court orders, and VA loan and transfers. Next slide. We currently have a remote workflow process where besides getting mail requests, we are also getting requests on a portal called event recs. They come in, they are processed, we have an option for digitally delivering responses to the requesters via a digital service. So it saves us a lot of time with mailing and having to send out copies of documents. Next slide, please. Since the start of the pandemic, we have responded to over 234,000 requests. Over 58,000 of those were burials, almost 29,000 medical emergencies, almost 12,000 requests to see shelter for homeless veterans, and 132,000 others for a total of over 234,000. Next slide, please. We were able to achieve those numbers because of a number of processes at a place. We issued laptops to our technicians. We created digital delivery of record documents. We instituted scanning and record documents. We stood up a remote call center for our customer service phones. We started digitizing our paper requests that are coming in through the mail and we increased staffing. Next, first and foremost was issuance of laptops. Over 500 have been issued along with the necessary. Prior to March 2020, very few staff had laptops or were working remotely. Employees can now connect to NARA's virtual private network and access multiple online resources to perform their remote work. Since deployment of laptops, our production has increased from about 2,500 cases per week to over 10,000 consistently per week. This was the first time our staff had laptops in their possession. Get them out during a pandemic with so many restrictions was a huge accomplishment. Next slide, please. Another big accomplishment was digital delivery of record documents. This was non-existent prior to the pandemic. The system was deployed in April 2020. Digital delivery dramatically decreased the time it takes us to respond to burials, medical emergencies, and other urgent cases, as well as follow-up requests. It allows the response to be delivered electronically to the requester through a dedicated online portal. We also added emergency requests submission to our eVetrex portal on archives.gov. Previously, emergencies could not be submitted online. They had to be faxed in. We also revised eVetrex to accept digital signatures. Before the pandemic, a wet signature had to be affixed to a piece of paper and faxed into us. So we've really come into the next century. Next slide, please. So this is just a small sample of what our technicians see in our case management system when digitally delivering documents. We add the documents to a digital envelope, and then the digital envelope is emailed to the requester. The requester uses their case number, which is randomly generated by our case management system. Their email address and either a phone number or zip code to authenticate their identity. They can then view, print, and save the documents. Next slide, please. We also introduced scanning pods. Currently, we have two teams of technicians scanning military personnel files to be added to the digital registry and then processed remotely. We have more than 90 million official military personnel files, and they're all paper. So this is a big chance for us to get them digitized. Right now, we're scanning about 1,800 records per week, and we intend to deploy more pods. We've also partnered with the VA to enable high speed scanning of our modern records. Next slide, please. Remote call center stood up, illustrates the number of calls taken. NPR stands for Military Personnel Records. That's our, and last week, as you can see, we answered over 4,400 calls asking how to submit a request, what the status is of a pending request, asking for an explanation of a response received, and calls from congressional offices. Next slide, please. We have an interagency agreement with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and about half of our backlog of incoming paper requests has now been digitized. Our mailroom staff, along with other remote workers, are working to digitize all these paper requests. I believe at last count, there was 250,000 of them. We're averaging about 7,500 requests digitized weekly at this point, but that number will grow because we're continuing to add remote staff. From this point forward, digitization will be handled locally for all these paper requests. Next slide, please. We have also established a fifth reference core. The reference core is where the technicians reside who actually answer all the incoming requests we get for information from the military records. We're hiring about 100 new technicians to process these requests. We've been offering over time, most Saturdays and Sundays. We have about 50 VA staff detailed to us right now to assist with searching records. We've also expanded our contract labor in our records retrieval branch to search and refile the necessary records. We've added a second shift in order to double our capacity within our staffing limitations, and NPRC staff were designated as critical infrastructure and arrangements were made for vaccine priority for any staff who wanted to receive a vaccine. Next slide, please. No matter what technical use, we are completely dependent on the over 300 staff members who continue to come on site throughout the darkest days of the pandemic to ensure emergency requests were processed. This included 66 days when we had exposures or potential exposures to COVID-19 on site. These are the superheroes of the National Personnel Record Center, and we're deeply indebted to them. We are very grateful for everything that our staff has done over the past year and a half almost. That's the end of my presentation. I thank you for having me. And are there any questions that I can answer at this point? Yes. Thank you, Lisa, for sharing the innovations that you've undertaken at the NPRC. We do have a couple of questions that have come in. The first one, I noticed on your chart that you were delivering veterans records via mail and then electronic delivery during COVID. Will you continue electronic delivery post COVID? Absolutely. We're trying to expand it. The more records we can get scanned, that's our biggest obstacle, is that, as I said, we have about 90 million military personnel records in our facility, but they're all paper. So the biggest obstacle is getting those scanned into a digital format so that we continue to deliver them electronically. Thank you. And a second question that's come in. My father is deceased. Is there a cost to get his military records? That depends on when he was in service. We do have a group of records that are called archival, and there may be a charge for copies of documents from those particular records. We can't actually answer that question unless I know the specifics. Thank you for that. That question has come in. There was a news story about NARA asking the Department of Defense for volunteers to assist the NPRC. Is there any update to that? I don't believe we've gotten a response from DOD yet. I haven't heard any new information on that one yet. We're still waiting for them to respond if they have any interest in doing it. Thank you. I will also point out that we've got a couple people in the chat who are kudos to the NPRC team in working under these pandemic conditions, and great job. Thank you. Very well received on that end. We appreciate that. Okay, this time I don't think there are any further questions. Again, if you have questions for Lisa and her team, please drop them in and we'll try to get to them at the end of the presentation. Now I'd like to turn it back over to Laurence for updates from the Office of the Chief Records Officer. Thanks, Ariane. So I'm back and I've got a few updates and some things going on that I wanted to tell you about. So the first one, and I'm sorry I don't have a slide so I'll just talk and put your questions in the chat. One of the things that is a fairly new initiative and we're really excited about is managing records in virtual environments. So here's a topic that we're all very familiar with. So this is a fairly recent initiative. So I mean, we go back to probably about four weeks ago, early in May, a working group of the CIO Council, also working with GSA, asked to talk to us about potential gaps in records management guidance related to agencies using virtual collaboration tools or platforms to conduct business. So obviously the CIO Council was looking at it from the perspective of the tools and fortunately there were colleagues of ours who were working with that group actually thought maybe we should talk to the National Archives about the records management implications of using these tools and we know over the past years we're working through the pandemic more and more of these kinds of tools have been implemented and a lot of them brought into the way agencies operate at a much more rapid pace than we might have seen in the past out of necessity, obviously. So we were very excited to talk to the group and we talked to them about current guidance we have. We have a 2009 Bolton on managing records in multi-agency environments. We talked to them a little bit about that, but that guidance was not exactly one point for what they were looking for. So we agreed with them that given the importance and relevance of the topic and it really made sense to look at it not only from the technology perspective, but from a records management perspective and do it this year. So one of the things that we're going to be doing and some of you listening today may already be aware of this that we are going to work with the CIO Council working group and with GSA to engage with you, the agencies, gather some information and try and determine based on the data what we need to develop from the National Archives in terms of newer revised guidance. So we are going to this month, later this month in June and in July participate in focus groups with a number of agencies to talk about the topic to gather data and see where agencies are and what tools they're using and how they're managing the records in those tools. And then we are also going to separately do a formal records management assessment which is not an inspection where we will reach out to a number of agencies to conduct interviews, collect documentation specifically on this topic with the goal of providing findings and recommendations based on the data that we find. So we will be using the results of that assessment to determine whether or not we need new guidance or revised guidance but it's a very exciting project that I think is going to be really important for all of us going forward as we continue to use these collaboration tools and platforms and making sure that there's no records management gaps and that we have guidance out to you, the implementers to make sure that we can close those gaps. The second thing I wanted to talk about is give you a quick update on where we are with the regulations and the standards for digitizing permanent records. So back in April my office completed the review and adjudication of the comments and concerns that came into us from the public review of the regulation. So we are right now expecting that the revised draft will be submitted to OMB and OIRA for review this month and depending on the outcome of their review we're hoping that it will become a final rule later this year. Again it's very hard to predict the timeline but it depends not only on OMB's reaction to our adjudication of the comments but whether or not we might need to engage with agencies on a comment that we may have received from the public that would need to be discussed. So we're hoping that it will be a more streamlined review and that we can get that final rule out to you later this year. I will say that the public comment period and the comments that we were able to review and adjudicate which related to topics like the definitions, quality management, some of the technical requirements, we got really good feedback from the vendors, from other agencies and from digitization policy counterpart parts in the public domain and in other countries. So all of the feedback really has helped us create a better version which will hopefully result in a more implementable standard and regulation. We also heard some concerns which we have taken to heart related to implementation. And the public did have some concerns about whether or not we could from the NARA perspective and from the agency perspective implement the standards as they are drafted. One of the things that we have acknowledged at the National Archives is that we will need to do some following guidance. So we are already planning on doing some checklist related to scanning legacy documents and FAQs, success criteria documents and other kinds of practical tools that will be issued after the finalization of the rule that will hopefully help you the agencies implement the standards. A couple other things. I wanted to let you know about some activities that are going on internally within records appraisal. So hopefully most of you are aware of the court decision crew versus the National Archives and ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement where the judge in the case determined that there was additional work that we would need to do and look specifically at as we are appraising and processing schedules that came to light in that court case. So one of the things that we are doing pursuant to that is continuing the work that we really started last year to review our own appraisal policy practices and procedures and really to look at ways on how we can improve and explain our appraisal decisions within our appraisal reports and for the public who are commenting on schedules. So a key part is looking as it was noted in the court decision, looking specifically at how we assess research value and separately how we then consider and respond to all the public comments that we get on schedules that we post on regs.gov. So we're specifically looking at those areas with the outcome hopefully later this year of having clear more specific guidance for our own staff appraisers including revised appraisal SOPs, new guidance around documenting decisions in the administrative record and new guidance for adjudicating public comments to make sure that we are responding to the court's decision to consider all the comments that come in from the public. So a lot of work going on internally. Some of you as you work with your appraisal archivist may come across some changes and requests. We want to make sure that we have everything that we need so that we can be fully responsive to answering questions about research value and documentation for the administrative record. So I think it's good for you to be aware of what we're doing. We'll keep you informed and we can talk to you a little bit more about some of these changes that we're going to be making as this year goes on. And then last is a quick update from the records management training program. So in May we implemented a cohort approach for new agency records officers who are seeking to get their agency records officer credential. We have a couple of cohorts currently underway and we're preparing for our next cohort of newly designated agency records officers which we right now expect will start in late July. The cohorts are usually you know around 25 agency records officers. We think it's a great way to sort of interact with your colleagues and really be part of a group as you work through the content. We are tracking designations and we are doing our best to notify newly designated records officers and make sure that you are up on your requirements to get the credential and slot you into an upcoming cohort. But if you haven't been contacted, if you're a newly designated records officer, by all means reach out to us at our group email box which is RMT records management training number one at narah.gov. So again that's RMT1 at narah.gov. Those are my updates and right now I'm going to pause and and ask Aran any questions on any of those topics so far. Thanks Lawrence. Yes there are a couple. The first one comes in and says what is an example of collaborative tools referring to the GSA work? Yes so I mean that's a really good question and that's one of the things that we're going to be collecting data on. I mean obviously Microsoft Teams is you know very common what we're using right now. Google Meet is another tool or platform but it it runs the gamut from you know communication you know apps and you know other newer kinds of you know technologies that agencies have turned to during the pandemic or have been using for years but you know to be frank we have an issued guidance on this topic in many many years so there's there's a lot for us to work on and one of the things that we're going to do and we'll be able to come back and talk to you about after we've done our assessment and focus groups is we'll have a much more specific inventory of what these tools are and from there then we'll focus on the records management implications of use of those tools. So I would say stay tuned and we will certainly be looking forward to sharing some of the results of this work at upcoming bridge meetings. Thank you question about digitization any idea of when we'll see digitization standards for special media AV transparencies etc. So that's a really good question it is certainly within it's certainly on our radar as the next phase of digitization standards that we know we need to work on I can't give you a timeline we honestly we are really focused on just trying to get these to final and get these out because we feel like the standards that we're working on right now for for paper records is going to cover the largest percentage of of legacy holdings out there in agencies that need to be digitized but we know that there are other special needs for those kinds of records and we have it on our radar we're planning it out it's something that we're going to be working on next fiscal year and hopefully our experience working through these regs will result in maybe quicker to market on the next phase but thank you for the question it is something that we'll work on and we'll have an update for you in the coming months. Thanks Lauren there's been an interesting discussion on YouTube I imagine the activities of the chief data officer and data analysts and scientists will have an impact on records appraisals since the cdo and data folks require large amount of data so just throw that out there if you want to comment on that or follow up on that yeah I will I mean that's a it's a great point and something that you know I think is is both exciting and challenging for all the records managers you know on the call today the volume the complexity is is overwhelming and is really a challenge I think for agencies trying to get a hold of all the various types of of information data and records and agencies one of the things that we have been doing is building relationships with the chief data officers council we had representatives from the cdo council come talk to the federal records management council at our last meeting and we have an ex officio spot on the council itself where we regularly attend the monthly meeting so what we're trying to do right now is really stay engaged with them and be aware of the issues and challenges that they're talking about and then trying to think through the records management side of things and then to the extent that we can point out as one as we're part of those cdo council meetings issues specific to records management that is really why we're there and what we're hoping to bring to the conversation so there's going to be a lot more discussion about that and it certainly fits into our larger approach of really pushing information governance within agencies and making sure that records data you know privacy FOIA other information management disciplines are coordinated within agencies and that includes data and the challenges that we see in that space thank you Lawrence as a reminder again I I'll we'll keep the chat open if there's any questions for Lawrence please submit those at this time we'd like to pivot to our capstone panel over the last few months we received a lot of questions about capstone and capstone implementation so we thought for today's bridge meeting we put together a capstone panel of experts if you will to answer those questions to go through those and lead us through that discussion first I'd like to introduce the panelist Margaret Hawkins is the director of records management operations in the office of the chief records officer she oversees the four appraisal teams the permanent records capture team a team that handles the GRS and the team researching and providing guidance on appraisal issues Hannah Bergman is an attorney in NARA's office of general counsel she advises on information policy including the federal records act and finally theater hall or TED is director of the electronic records division this division is responsible for accessioning processing preserving and providing access to NARA's holdings of born digital federal electronic records including email so with that I'd like to welcome the three of them to the panel and kick it off by asking the first question will NARA expand the capstone guidance and GRS 6.1 to cover other types of electronic messaging hi um this is Hannah yes NARA does have a plan to expand the capstone bulletin for other types of electronic messages we've got a team that's working on a draft right now and we're trying to kind of talk through what that would look like um what the best approach is to make sure we're capturing um the the other types of electronic messages um with the updated guidance once we've got that in good shape um we'll work on updating the GRS and then other tools to help agencies implement the guidance and like all guidance products that we have you know we we do seek input through the federal records council and um so I would expect that that to happen in this case as well so that something you can be on the lookout for thanks Aryan oh thank you Hannah the next question do you have any best practices or know of tools agencies are using to track their capstone officials sure and I'll take that one as well this is Hannah again um I think that we have seen the most success when agencies are able to partner with their human capital offices and have some sort of automated uh tracking system in place whether I quasi automate it might be a better way to put it but you know getting emails or some sort of updates about when it is people are coming into positions um that have been designated as capstone officials and and uh track the turnover that way um so you know in addition to the the human capital folks it's important that um agencies partner with their it team as well there can be a lot of changes that need to happen um on the back end so system administrators can have many need to make those changes when it comes to implementation of the schedule um you know people coming and going from positions etc um also it would say the acting um piece right when someone's been in an acting role for some period of time and as a result or a capstone official um that is you know obviously a very heavy burden to manage uh keeping track of acting folks and so that's where the partnerships with human capital and information services or whatever agencies you know call their it operations folks um are really important in terms of being able to get those automated alerts and make sure someone's able to go in the back end to make those changes when a person is in an acting capacity for a length of time that would trigger the capstone um retention periods um I think in terms of tools you know most agencies use Microsoft for their email services I don't think that's a surprise or secret um that we do have a lot of agencies they're using and trying to figure out how best to use the built-in um e-discovery and records management tools that come with 365 and so we have um an agency uh users group meeting um the 365 um users group that the office of the chief records office are host and that's um a place where you know if you're not a part of it and you use 365 for any sort of um email records management or e-discovery obligations I really encourage you to to reach out to Lawrence's folks and join that um join that group because agencies are able to talk through kind of these best practices or bring questions or problems to the group and and solve them in real time by hearing how their colleagues and other agencies are are handling um and then I think otherwise you know we are worried about text messages obviously that's another kind of electronic message so it does kind of tell with what I speaking about earlier but um I think the text messaging issue you know we do see a lot of agencies conducting business by text message and so it's important that if you're taking a capstone approach to those messages you're able to implement that as well so for example the national archives we have software that forwards any text messages from your phone into um your email and then it's automatically managed just like your email so if you're a capstone official you know it's retained appropriately and if you're not then it's kept uh for the the shorter seven-year period um so I would if you've got text messaging enabled on your phones at your agency think about um what tools are in place that you guys have that can can do that automated management um and then calendar appointments I think are another issue often that's rolled up in the email and isn't a problem but to the extent it's not um that can be something that agencies need to look at so I think I think that's kind of eight um but I'll turn it back to you Arjen. Thank you Hannah and I will just put a reminder to folks if you're interested in that office 365 user group that Hannah mentioned just email us at rmpolicy at nar.gov and we will hook you up make sure you get into that group get the invites things like that so with that the next question is uh probably from Maggie we've heard about the resubmission process so when is more information about the capstone resubmission process going to be coming out? Great question Arjen um thanks Hannah for talking so much about implementation uh but as you all know before you get to implementation uh we have to have a approved capstone form in NA 1005 and as you all know uh agencies change organizations change and one of the things we're doing to kind of help facilitate the accurate uh tracking of positions is we'll be starting a mandatory resubmission process that Arjen referred to and what we have right now is we have a project team working on a bulletin that will address this resubmission process and we will be doing this through in our bulletin because we it's necessary to codify the resubmission requirements um in the meantime FAQs have been updated to address questions about when and how agencies should resubmit or otherwise update their NA 1005 forms and those FAQs are easily obtainable on our website. Thank you Maggie will this new form be available in the ERA 2.0? Yes the um so as Arjen mentioned we also have a new form which is in some ways linked to the resubmission process but in some ways separate and as you all may know from other presentations here at Bridge and elsewhere we are rolling out a new ERA 2.0 and the plan there is for the system to be rolled out in summer of 2022 and we hope to have the ERA the NA 1005 form in ERA and that's dependent on a couple of different things and if it's at all delayed we will be having it roll out the same calendar year as the scheduling module will be rolling out but so again the ERA rolling out in summer of 2022 hopefully the capstone form with it that's the plan and if it's at all delayed it should only be by a few months and be coming out the same calendar year. So I thought to what might be helpful is um telling you a little bit more about the form itself as Arjen noted it is a new form which is always you know exciting for all of us to have something that we think will be much easier currently the form is in a fillable PDF format which is a fairly user-friendly however after studying this issue for a bit we have decided to move it to an Excel format and this format will have the information arrayed across various tabs we think it will be easier to fill out we've practiced with it with real capstone forms seeing how it fits to fill it out it's also much much easier to export for various purposes as Hannah mentioned interimplementation tracking positions is a pretty you know quite an intensive process and having it this data more easily exportable and manageable should help with that and that new form should be coming out later this calendar year separate from other parts of the resubmission process and it's currently going through a formal forms approval process thanks Maggie sorry for jumping around a bit can you remind everyone what the mandatory resubmission requirements are I don't think you may you may have not have mentioned those yes thank you for reminding me to circle back to that so as I mentioned we have a new form coming out we have ERA 2.0 rolling out next summer but then we also have the mandatory resubmission process and Ariane has asked so when is when does that kick in so that was going to start in 2023 all agencies using the capstone approach must resubmit their capstone form and we'll have to do so every four years thereafter so just to kind of so you don't have to do the math in in your head on all this so very specifically the first new resubmission will be due on or about January 2nd 2023 and then the next one on or about January 2nd 2027 and I want to point out that these dates refer to very specific mandatory resubmissions but in addition agencies can submit changes to their forms on what we call an ad hoc basis and we get a you know fair number of these and these would be for major organizational or other changes and you can talk about those with your appraisal archivist we also have information on our FAQs about that and I just wanted to point out that sometimes if the changes are minor we may ask agencies to save those up for the formal resubmission process although we also recognize that some agencies have in a good way been under you know have been concerned about making sure that that that form which is up there on our public website is up to date so we've you know we've we've been more flexible about that as well thank you Maggie now we have a couple of questions about transfer once the emails have come to NARA so I'll turn to Ted how many agencies have transferred capstone email to the National Archives well thanks Ariane for that question I'm going to answer at first very literally and just to remind everyone a little bit about the the lineage of the capstone GRS since its implementation and with the 15 to 25 year retention period and given that the provisions of M1218 to manage all emails electronically only took effect in 2016 we've seen only one transfer of some legacy emails under that capstone disposition authority the vast majority of agencies indicated on the NA 1005 submissions that they only began managing their emails in 2016 or or near around them or around that time period and so per that was per M1218 again so the earliest that we would expect to receive emails under the capstone disposition authority for the vast majority of agencies would be around 2031 or later but I should say on the other hand the electronic records division has accession millions of emails from federal agencies under approved agency record schedules so these records include email from the federal components of the executive office of the president since the Clinton administration DOJ senior officials from the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations federal communications commission commissioners email from officials in a number of temporary commissions in fact as that have gone out of business and email of the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction so we have a considerable volume of email it's just we're we're still waiting for the capstone retention to to work its way through and so sometime in the future we'll we'll be seeing more emails come in against that disposition authority thank you Ted I was sort of building on that it has not made any capstone email available to researchers if of what we've had and what tools did we use so again to to address that literally we we have received no request for the capstone emails that we received under that that single transfer so I would like to address that though I mean we have made emails in the other series I referenced available to researchers and we use a variety of tools to search emails for responsive for responsive emails based on the questions received from researchers we consider all emails to be to to have a variety of FOIA exemptions applied to them so when agencies transfer email we do ask them to specify the FOIA exemptions that we believe that they believe applies to the emails and then our archivists in both the electronic records division and our FOIA and special access division will review the content of responsive emails against the FOIA exemptions prior to their release and do the appropriate redactions and release the emails after having undergone that review thanks Ted and I sort of we've talked a little bit about ERA 2.0 during this session will ERA 2.0 be able to ingest capstone email from federal agencies in the years down the road right so the expectation is that ERA 2.0 will someday provide the capabilities for agencies to transfer records directly to that system until that time agencies transfer records to the electronic records division for processing prior to upload an ingest to ERA 2.0 which is our digital repository those transfers can come to us at this time on a variety of removable media or via SFTP so if you're interested if you have records electronic records eligible for transfer throughout the pandemic we've been receiving records on media we have individuals go into the building to retrieve the mail and handle and process electronic records on site as needed and also we've seen a great deal of expansion of our SFTP capabilities so we can provide you with additional resources or reach out to the division at e-transfersetnara.gov thank you Ted sure sort of another question why does my agency have to keep their temporary email for seven years for anyone not in the three-year ban can you first explain the difference between the three and seven-year bans and then explain why I would have to keep any email for seven years it's very costly and difficult to implement and I think it should be my agency's choice and responsibility to determine sure this is he and I'll take that one um sorry sorry I'm getting a call so I apologize um I think so the first thing to kind of work backwards from the question one you know the idea of record scheduling is that the National Archives and the appraisal archivist work with the agency records officer to come to an appropriate retention for email using our expertise and our experience in the archival profession right so that's part of why you know this is something that that NARA has come to determine and we've done that through the GRS right so agencies do have a lot of discretion in how they manage records within the retentions that we set and they have a lot of discretion and flexibility working with us to set those retentions but once the retentions are set they are mandatory um so the GRS GRS 6.1 breaks things into three different bans right the capstone permanent ban that we often talk about the seven-year ban and the three-year ban um the three-year ban is really focused on um employees who aren't going to be conducting significant policy um work or agency decision making through email that's going to require those emails be kept for a long-term preservation so if you just look at item 12 in the GRS itself I think the language is fairly clear and that's really you know where we take our instruction here so item 12 says these you know in talking about the three-year ban these duties comprise general office or program support activities and frequently facilitate the work of federal agencies in their programs this includes but is not limited to roles and positions that process routine transactions provide customer service involved mechanical crafts or unskilled or semi-skilled or skilled manual labor respond to general requests for information involved routine clerical work and or primarily receive non-recorded duplicative email right so those are folks in the three-year ban we expect that to be a minority of agency employees item 11 which is the seven-year ban should be the vast majority of all federal employees and you know to the extent contractors are creating email records most contractor records are going to fall into the seven-year ban as well um so those are going to be employees like myself um you know who are late like uh like Ted like Maggie sort of the other panel members as well right so our emails are seven-year records under the schedule and we are providing advice we're talking about policy um you know but we're not that that level of capstone official nor are we doing sort of the routine administrative work that would be a three-year position so other other types of employees that might fall in the seven-year ban would be um management of program analysts folks in the human capital office folks in your budget and finance team people who work in the mission area who are doing you know substantive work of the agency you also might see SES employees or other leaders leadership SL appointments in the in the seven-year ban depending on the size of your agency so if you're a very large agency you know that that certainly might be true um and this seven-year time frame is really kind of meant to look at what are the retentions across schedules you know for the types of records that we we see an email and what are the statute of limitations related to claims that might um involve those records take that into account and come up with you know the best uh the best thing that we can um for a uniform retention and that's how we arrived at the seven-year mark so I get that it costs money and I get that it's hard but I also think you know this is the fundamental premise of the national archives and the fundamental premise of records management is that yes it does cost money but it ultimately saves you money saves you time saves you resources in the long run right so the reason that we the records disposal act of 1950 was passed was because agencies were hoarding records and there was no way for them to dispose of information and I think we all know that from like our own practices if you don't have kind of these retention bans that are said and are enforced the human tendency is to just keep the information and let it pile up and as a consequence to that you can't find what you need and you spend additional money storing information that you don't need um and anytime you need to go looking for it your search uh is going to cost more and you're indexing and you and all your processing of those records is going to cost more because your volume is going to be so much larger than it needs to be and so that's why you know we've we've come up with this uniform uh approach of the three year the seven year and the permanent bans for email um and you know yes it may seem like it costs more money at particular points in time but I think overall compared to what we saw agencies doing before the capstone approach I do think it's a net benefit for everyone um so I kind of I hope that addresses the question um thank you Hannah I think I think you covered it very well I'd like to ask a question that came in sort of directed towards you can you provide the software that NARA is using to automatically capture text messages and email or talk more about that um sure there are a number of software tools out there that that do that we happen to be using telemessage which is one of the um tools that work with Verizon I also know that that is a third party tool that integrates with the Microsoft um 365 e-discovery compliance center uh if you happen to use Verizon and Microsoft 365 we do not use 365 um we use Gmail but it still integrates with that as well but there are a number of other tools out there I have no way endorsing telemessage I'm just saying that is the tool that we use please go about like a full and open competition and if you're interested you know procuring noted noted thank you um Maggie did you want to say more about the capstone forum or have we covered that I feel like we've covered it but um if there's been any follow-up questions okay I just wanted to make sure we I know we sort of jumped around a bit uh we do have a question and I'll just open it up and and let you guys tackle it how best you see fit what is the best tool agencies are able to use to capture all capstone records not only email but also policy memos documents etc so I was hoping to divide this into two to answer so I was going to kind of talk about it from the scheduling perspective and then maybe see if Hannah or Ted had anything about the sort of tools component of it so um first off on the scheduling perspective I wanted to point out that it's not a given that all records of all capstone officials would be a permanent record email is a discrete body of records it's you know account driven I sort of like to think of it as this giant safety net pulling in a lot a lot a lot of permanent records uh the number of accounts NARA will be accessioning over the upcoming years is a it's a pretty staggering amount I don't have a count on it right now but it is a lot it is significant once you start going into all the records of all capstone officials for an agency you're you're it's upping the ante quite a bit on the the the volume the compliance burden etc the GRS still may apply to many of those officials records and they're under there may be appraisal decisions to be made about uh whether which of their records are permanent and which are not so I guess I would caution people on that you may be um you know there may be an assumption being made there that that it would be um dramatically increasing uh uh maybe needlessly increasing the volume of of permanent records and and when you think about the the difficulty of applying capstone to email I'm in a one hand it's meant to be simple um I hear from agencies it's you know more complex than it might seem on the surface but at least you're dealing with generally one big system in an agency and at very discrete clear accounts once you start getting into all these other records I think at least from what I've seen in my many years as an appraiser that's a whole different uh scenario so that's what I would say on the scheduling in terms of case the question really was more focused on tools to help capture I thought I might turn it over to some of the other panelists if they have any thoughts on tools per se Maggie I don't I don't have a a specific comment about tools but your your commentary reminded me of the capstone FAQ and the really excellent section in there about culling as from a transfer and access perspective the more an agency can do to cull out non-record personal emails and other materials um the the better it is for us on the review side that we're not having to to review that in the event that we get a request for for the email and I can chime in a little bit on the tools piece and just kind of echo what I said earlier which is that we do see a lot of agencies using the 365 e-discovery compliance center to manage other documents that are within the microsoft environment and so if your agency has 365 again join the user group that arian mentioned I think it's rm rm will chime in with how to join the user group the rm policy email address but that is something certainly a number of agencies are working to to implement um and have had you know varying degrees of success and and done in in all sorts of different ways um you know I think we we too are using kind of a hybrid approach of you know where we have records stored in our google environment and how we get those into um permanent records uh records management tool um that we have uh outside of the google environment but you know which is a a more manual process that that I think we would like but um I think we're there there are good options for managing any documents that are kind of housed with your email in either a google environment nair cloud or the 365 um one drive environment um so definitely join the 365 users and that email address again is rm policy at nara.gov and our team will be happy to add you to the list uh we've had a question come in from dhs uh for capstone records I understand that it is account driven will the person under the capstone program be the person's email account or captured in a separate distribution list I'm not I'm not sure I understand the question does do want do the other panelists if the question is asking about distribution lists and whether or not when a capstone person is a part of the distribution list if that makes the distribution list a capstone record I think we would say it's anything that's going to or from that person the capstone official's email and is in the capstone official's account that we're looking at as a capstone email as a permanent record um which would exclude non-record so if the distribution list is like agency press releases I think that would be an example of um something that we wouldn't you know the distribution list wouldn't be the record keeping copy of that um but if the distribution list is like you know agency executive leadership team right and you've got morris on that that email the copy that's in morris's inbox would be a capstone record that's what the question's asking yeah if that's what it's asking I agree with with Hannah's uh that that that would be the answer I I think that covers the question uh the landscape of that question pretty adequately if not please person who asked it uh follow up we do have a question uh since Microsoft announced they will no longer be supporting pst files does not have a solution to accessing accessing older email files since pst is one of the two preferred formats in the case of having a need to access older pst files in the next few years um I I guess I can speak to that if I understand so as as the the um the person mentions pst is uh is is an acceptable format for the transfer of amalgamations of emails um I wasn't I'm not familiar with the scenario that the requester is asking um we have tools um that we use pst viewer again not an endorsement an official endorsement um it's just a tool we use to crack open psts and review their contents um we also use other tools to export individual emails or emails from the pst format so the pst is is certainly a very convenient way to manage amalgamations of emails um and support their transfer if we're talking about an individual account or an individual um group of emails and I would also chime in and say that I think this question surfaced at the 365 users group meeting um and then we took that back to Microsoft because we do have um regular meetings with Microsoft to talk about uh record management issues and Microsoft assured us that they are not phasing out support of psds they thought perhaps there's a confusion um related to the export format um from the e-discovery tool but if there was a confusion pst has been re-added as a format um from that from that tool if it if something happened so the bottom line was there is no phasing out of support uh from psds according to the Microsoft records and management people and they were very confused by that question um when we brought it to them so it sounds like there might have been some miscommunication around that issue well that's good to know right thank you Hannah thank you Ted I'll put out one more call for questions on capstone we have one that's come in will NARA accept encrypted emails from capstone officials or will the federal agency records officer have to work with their agency it department to decrypt those records those emails all right yeah NARA will not accept encrypted emails no uh so we would um we've advised agencies to uh so first off it matters whether they're clearly you're talking about permanent records if they're temporary records uh you know that that's a that's a different question if they're permanent as Ted noted we won't accept them so uh what we're looking at is uh you know agency may decide to what we call like put it on ice for a while and see if the technology evolves and if they're able to eventually decrypt them or um if you know the keys are found which which has happened before uh the other option would be agencies would need to schedule them for destruction because technically they would not be covered under any schedule for destruction then we would look at the situation uh when when this happens we do ask what lengths people have gone to try to decrypt them uh so it's not like a rubber stamping operation and uh it's um you know it presents a conundrum but it's one that's many agencies are probably going to face over the upcoming years um Han I don't know if you you seem like maybe you were like leaning forward to add something um I was just going to say so I think first Nara will not accept any encrypted records regardless of what four months are in so not just email you've got to decrypt it we can't we don't have like secret decryption capabilities right if you can decrypt it we can't decrypt it why would we take records we can't open um like you know right Ted's team couldn't process them uh so that's just across the board no matter what the file type is um but I would say that a properly configured email archive or email journaling solution will allow export of encrypted emails so you know we we have a a setup where we've got our email journal and an archive you know in a separate repository and it's encrypted in transit when the email is sent it's encrypted when it goes to the repository and the repository itself is encrypted but you can export the emails in an unencrypted fashion and so that that is a pretty straightforward setup um so make sure that you're working with your it um so that that you've got that export capability in hand I think the challenge tends to be when someone might send an encrypted attachment in an email and say I'm going to send the password later right like then hopefully there's an accompanying email with that record which has the password to unencrypt the file um and then the I think the other challenge can be when when things have been encrypted with keys um for example in your pip card or something that have expired and the agency hasn't maintained that um encryption key that's um I think a a difficult challenge to overcome and something that we really encourage you to work with your it folks to make sure isn't going to present itself as a problem in the long run thank you Hannah uh with that uh I want to thank the capstone panel for some very informative information and answering a bunch of questions that came in I do want to now open it up to the general questions uh to see if there's any outstanding we do have one is Lisa Sandor available still yes thank you Lisa I do have one for you um are the digitized records being attached to the veterans records within the online database um if by that you mean our our registry uh boy that's kind of a technical question and I'm not sure the answer we are keeping a digital registry of the records that are being scanned however I don't know if they are attached physically to our registry I think it's a separate registry of the digital ones I hope that that answers thank you that sounds good to me I'll leave it at that and again I'll put out a last call for any questions I'll acknowledge that there's been follow-on conversations on YouTube about encryption and parallel quantum computing there's some smart people chatting over there we appreciate that engagement uh just checking all the places where we capture your questions to see if there's anything outstanding and having seen none uh just go to the next slide please okay so I'll just remind folks uh the next bridge meeting will be on Tuesday August 24th uh 2021 you can always send us comments or questions at rm.communications.nara.gov and on this screen you'll see the the link to the bimonthly the bridge page on our website where we capture the meeting the slides transcripts all the information about past meetings is also available there so with that I'd like to thank everyone for attending our bridge meeting today and wish you all a good afternoon good good day wherever you are again thank you very much