April 2023 Newsletter – NARA and What It Means For You

The National Archives and Records Administration, best known as NARA; is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government within the executive branch. Its primary task is to protect, preserve, and keep up to date government records. This helps maintain transparency within the government and allows people the ability to obtain, utilize, and learn from the information of our past and present. According to USA.gov, “The National Archives and Records Administration preserves U.S. government records, manages the Presidential Libraries system, and publishes laws, regulations, Presidential, and other public documents.” Basically, they are America’s record keeper.

As you can imagine a lot of those records are analog records or better known as paper records. Although we have become more modern and technological with every passing year a nice sized chunk of our old records are still paper. In 2019, the U.S. government made strides to transition away from paper to fully electronic records. The NARA even set a deadline of December 31, 2022 in which they would stop accepting analog records. The task to digitize all of the government agencies backlog (we’re talking hundreds of thousands of records) was daunting. On December 23, 2022, the White House released a memorandum stating they would extend the deadline until June 30, 2024. By this time Federal agencies must manage all permanent records in an electronic format for eventual transfer.

The Importance of NARA

Why should this matter? Why is this important? Transparency and accountability. That is what these records provide and having strong records management and access to these records is how we do that. Lets make it more personal. The National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) is a part of NARA. Each year the NPRC responds to about 1.1 million requests for military service records from veterans and their families. When you break that down that’s more than 4,000 requests per work day. These requests consists of burials of our deceased veterans, medical emergencies, homeless veterans shelter, and more. The NPRC is just one division of NARA.

History matters. Our veterans matter. Our records matter. According to Archives.org, NARA allocated $600,000 in the 2023 fiscal year for the transfer and maintenance of digitized records  from the VA and are maintained in NARA’s cloud. Large and small businesses can learn from the government pushing and making strides to digitize their records. At Graphic Imaging we can scan your paper files and digitalize them for you. We can scan your documents with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and make them searchable. The days of going through boxes and filing cabinets for an old file no longer has to be your journey. Whether you work in the government sector and need assistance digitizing your records or are a small or large business, we can help. With our document management solutions you can save time and money and have access to all of your files at your fingertips.

Call us today at 702-222-3590 for a quote. Let us give you a helping hand. Let us help you digitize.

Sources: Whitehouse.gov, Archive.org