The Race to Manage Government Records Begins

As federal agencies crawl toward deadlines to permanently store their records in digital formats, the National Archives and Records Administration is bringing together vendors that want a piece of that business.

An August 2012 presidential directive requires agencies to store all emails digitally by 2016 and to store other records digitally by 2019. In advance of those deadlines, the Archives is inviting vendors to schedule Web presentations about their technology before interested members of the federal information management community, according to the notice posted this month. Vendors will be responsible for hosting and scheduling the webinars, according to an information page. The archives will simply pass that scheduling information on to records management officials at government agencies.