All Federal agencies are required to produce a strategic document every four years. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) invites public and government partners, stakeholders, and colleagues in the archival, historical, and records management communities to submit comments on NARA’s draft 2018-2022 Strategic Plan.
The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) encourages its stakeholders to submit comments on NARA’s strategic plan by the September 1, 2017 deadline.
Instructions to provide feedback are available online or by email to strategy@nara.gov. If you have any questions about the draft plan or the review process, please email strategy@nara.gov or the PIDB’s email pidb@nara.gov.
Highlights from NARA’s Draft Strategic Plan:
The draft strategic plan establishes NARA’s mission, strategic goals, and objectives. The plan describes how NARA will meet a vision of the agency’s future where it will be known for “cutting-edge access to extraordinary volumes of government information and unprecedented engagement to bring greater meaning to the American experience.” Notably, the plan provides Federal agencies, already implementing electronic records management, with a deadline for the next step in the transition to fully-electronic recordkeeping: By December 31, 2022, NARA will no longer accept transfers of permanent or temporary records in analog formats and will accept records only in electronic format and with appropriate metadata.
Other select goals and objectives include:
- By FY 2019: NARA will conduct inspections of records management practices at 10% of Federal agencies, to ensure that Federal email and other permanent electronic records are being managed in an electronic format.
- By FY 2020: Digitize 500 million pages of records and make them available online to the public through the National Archives Catalog
- By FY 2021: 82% of NARA holdings will be processed to enable discovery by the public
- By FY 2025: Provide finding aids to 95 percent of the holdings described in the National Archives Catalog
- By FY 2025: NARA’s data will be used as a primary data source by at least 15 external sources
- By FY 2025: Will have 1 million records enhanced by citizen contributions to the National Archives Catalog
The PIDB will post its comments on NARA’s draft strategic plan in the coming weeks.