Federal Records Must Go Digital, but Managers Say They Can't Do It Without More Resources

Nearly half of federal records managers believe the Obama Administration’s goals for making all new records digital and electronically searchable by 2019 is unrealistic, a new study has found.

That deadline, introduced in an August 2012 presidential directive, upset transparency advocates who said it gave agencies a pass to delay transitioning to digital records management systems and would result in even transparency-friendly agencies putting their limited resources toward other priorities. Now, records managers say even that far off deadline won’t be achievable without more funding and better trained records management professionals, according to the study released by MeriTalk, a public-private partnership focused on improving how the government manages information technology. The study was underwritten by the information management company Iron Mountain. Most importantly, just 54 percent of survey respondents said they’d be able to meet a mandate in the directive to identify all permanent records that must be digitized by Dec. 31. Only 18 percent of respondents said they’d made significant progress in actually digitizing permanent records, while 70 percent said they had little progress to report.