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The workings of government in the first decades of the information era have been poorly recorded, archiving experts say. Years of valuable public records may have already been lost, creating a gap in the country's historical record.
Archivists, government watchdog groups and investigative reporters worry that unless the problem is solved, the lack of information could make it more difficult to hold government officials accountable for their decisions and policies.
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"We know less about information in the information age," said
Patrice McDermott, a records management analyst with government
watchdog agency
Records management experts say the problem started around 1985, when
U.S. government agencies began using e-mail and word-processing
programs as they changed the way they conducted business. But they did
it without a system for preserving electronic files. Under the old system, multiple copies of correspondence and
documents were carefully filed away. But now that nearly all government
operations use electronic documents, the old "paper trail" of how
policies and regulations developed, and who made them, has been lost. Now, experts say, only the final draft is saved, making it more
difficult to understand how decisions were made, who made them, and why
-- the very information most crucial to historians and investigative
reporters. "The way it used to work is that when you created a document, it
circulated with five carbons that were filed in different places,"
McDermott said. "People started storing things on their own disks, willy-nilly,"
McDermott said. "I'm sure agencies have made print copies of the final
documents, but the carbons of who had checked the document and how it
was marked up are missing. So, reporters and investigators will have no
record of how a policy came into being." The problem doesn't look to be solved anytime soon. Much of the
blame is falling on the shoulders of the National Archive Records
Administration (NARA) -- the agency charged with recording the history of government. As for the estimated 26 million U.S. government webpages, there are
no archiving guidelines at all. However, just days before the Bush
administration took office, NARA instructed all agencies to take a
snapshot of its websites and submit the data to NARA on CD-ROM by March
20. The lack of an effective system for archiving electronic records
troubles Scott Armstrong, an investigative journalist who cut his teeth
in the Watergate Era. Armstrong believes by the time the problem is solved, there will be
a 25-year hole in the historical record. He's fond of calling it the
"Carlin Gap," in mocking honor of John Carlin, archivist of the United
States since 1992. "The gap is enormous," Armstrong said. "I estimate they're
preserving less than 1 percent of the electronic documents, and
somewhere between 50 and 75 percent of the kind of records previously
(in the paper era) archived are being lost." Lewis Bellardo, deputy archivist of the United States, said he
didn't know how much data has been lost government-wide, but he used a
telling example to acknowledge that there was a problem. Due to a server glitch, NARA lost some of its internal agency
records in the summer of 1999. "We had an e-mail loss here ourselves,"
Bellardo said. "If that's the case with us, it's probably not just us."
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