Sunday, February 19, 2012

February BRIDG Meeting

February BRIDG Meeting:

Please mark your calendars for the next BRIDG meeting scheduled for Wednesday, February 15, 2012, from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. The Pre-BRIDG Networking Hour will be held from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. The meeting will be held at the National Archives and Records Administration downtown building, 700 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW (Metrorail’s Yellow or Green lines to the Archives/Navy Memorial station) in the McGowan Theater. Please enter on the Constitution Avenue side of the building.


Meeting agenda items include the following:



  • Presidential Memorandum Update Paul M. Wester, Jr., Chief Records Officer, will give a brief update on the activities NARA and other Federal agencies are conducting in response to the Presidential Memorandum—Managing Government Records.

  • Using Scanning to Jump Start a Business Process Markus Most, Federal Records Centers Program’s (FRCP) Director of Business Development, will give a report on how the FRCP is providing scanning services to help its agency customers streamline and modernize business processes. The presentation will include an overview of a large-scale scanning project the FRCP is undertaking to assist the Veterans Administration in digitizing its claims process as well as information on other smaller-scale projects at other Federal agencies.

  • Appraisal Team Reorganization Margaret Hawkins, Director of Records Management Services, will give an update on the reorganization of the Appraisal Teams and agency assignments, as announced in Memorandum to Federal Agency Contacts AC 07.2012.  Her presentation will cover the open houses that the Office of the Chief Records Officer and the FRCP are jointly hosting for agencies to meet their appraisal archivist and account manager.

  • General Records Schedule (GRS) Team Margaret Hawkins will also give a presentation about the newly formed GRS Team. This team’s role is to update and revise the General Records Schedules, create new General Records Schedules, and serve as subject matter experts.  The presentation will provide an overview of the three projects the team will be focusing on this FY: 1) a study to consider how best to restructure and update the GRS to better meet agency needs; 2) guidance on incorporating GRS authorities into agency big bucket or functional schedules; and 3) drafting a new GRS to cover web and social media records.


As we mentioned in the September 9, 2011 ”BRIDG Improvements” memo, NARA has been exploring how to offer a live webcast of BRIDG meetings. During this BRIDG, we will be piloting delivery of the meeting to a small group of testers, and we want in-person attendees at the meeting aware that it will be filmed and webcast live to this small group of testers. We hope to offer webcasting of BRIDG meetings to all agencies in the very near future.


Pre-BRIDG Networking Hour


Join your colleagues in records management from other agencies and NARA Agency Services staff from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. in the Jefferson Room (Mezzanine Level of the National Archives Building) to chat over doughnuts and coffee. Feel free to bring materials to share from your agency (announcements of upcoming RM-related events, job openings, etc.).


To reserve a place for the Agency Services-BRIDG meeting and/or the pre-BRIDG networking hour, please provide your name, telephone number, and agency via email to rm.communications@nara.gov, no later than Monday, February 13, 2012. You may reserve places for several staff in the same email, but for security purposes we must have each individual’s name and telephone number. To attend the pre-BRIDG networking hour, you must RSVP in your email response. We need to determine an accurate headcount for catering.Please email Shannon Olsen at shannon.olsen@nara.gov, or call 301-837-3486 if you need assistance.


NARA encourages agencies to participate at BRIDG by presenting best practices or lessons learned that would be helpful to other attending agencies. If you wish to lead a discussion, please leave a comment here.


We reserve the right to postpone or cancel a meeting at any time. We will make every effort to contact registrants by e-mail and telephone if that occurs, so complete information at the time of registration is very important. Meetings WILL BE CANCELLED if the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announces a “closed,” “unscheduled leave,” “liberal leave,” or “delayed arrival” policy for Federal employees for that day or if there has been an elevation to threat level RED in the Homeland Security status. Official Government closing and leave information is located on the OPM web site.




Presidential Memorandum Briefing Slides

Presidential Memorandum Briefing Slides
by Arian Ravanbakhsh
The Office of the Chief Records Officer has been making the rounds talking about the Presidential Memorandum and all the work that is underway to draft the response. We’ve spoken to audiences inside the National Archives and to regional ARMA Chapters (the Metro Maryland as well as the Greater Baltimore Chapters) with additional events lined up over the next few weeks and months.

We wanted to share the current briefing slides that we have been using for these presentations. They can be downloaded here as a .pdf file. We will update this presentation as we continue to work on the Presidential MemorandumPresidential Memorandum Briefing Slides:

The Office of the Chief Records Officer has been making the rounds talking about the Presidential Memorandum and all the work that is underway to draft the response. We’ve spoken to audiences inside the National Archives and to regional ARMA Chapters (the Metro Maryland as well as the Greater Baltimore Chapters) with additional  events lined up over the next few weeks and months.


We wanted to share the current briefing slides that we have been using for these presentations. They can be downloaded here as a .pdf file. We will update this presentation as we continue to work on the Presidential Memorandum.




NARA Launching IdeaScale for Presidential Memorandum

Launching IdeaScale for Presidential Memorandum
by Arian Ravanbakhsh
We are happy to announce the start of our public information gathering related to the Presidential Memorandum on Managing Government Records. We will be using the IdeaScale tool for this. Records and information management professionals, vendors, and the general public are all invited to participate in this community.

We have set up the Managing Government Records IdeaScale at http://govrecordmanagement.ideascale.com/. This community will be open for comments until March 27, 2012.

Here is how it works. You can also download this handy .pdf of quick tips.

Create a free IdeaScale account.
Submit your ideas for improving the management of Federal records under the six categories specified by the President in the Memorandum. These are: Creating a government-wide framework; Promoting practices that enable agencies to Fulfill Missions; Maintaining accountability through documentation; Increasing Open Government and Access; Supporting Agency Compliance; and Transitioning from paper to electronic when feasible.
Provide comments on ideas already submitted.
Vote “up” or “down” on posted ideas. This will indicate to others what you think of the idea.
Encourage others to participate! Send a link to your colleagues or professional network
Check back to the site to see what is going on. Did others like your idea? Do you have something else to propose?
In addition to Ideascale, feel free to contribute a comment here. Let us know of the ideas big and small that should inform the directive to be issued this summer in response to the Presidential Memorandum.

Thank you for your participation!

Sunday, February 12, 2012

2012 Electronic Records Management Event Worth Considering

2012 Austin e-Forum
This message is from our colleagues at The National Association of Government Archives and Records Administrators (NAGARA)
Registration is now open for the 2012 E-Records Forum, a unique conference focusing on current issues in Electronic Records Management. This program is sponsored by NAGARA, and co-sponsored by the NARA Southwest Region, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, University of Texas at Austin School of Information, and the Society of Southwest Archivists.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Autonomy Unveils Next-Generation Information Platform Built for "Human Information" Era

Autonomy Unveils Next-Generation Information Platform Built for "Human Information" Era: Autonomy Unveils Next-Generation Information Platform Built for "Human Information" Era. 29, 2011 – Autonomy, an HP Company , today announced a groundbreaking information platform, , designed to help organizations understand and process 100 percent of enterprise information in real time. The platform combines Autonomy's infrastructure software for automatically processing and understanding unstructured data with the high performance real time analytics engine for extreme structured data from Vertica, an HP Company.

Autonomy Unveils New IDOL-Based HP TRIM Enterprise Records Management Solution

Autonomy Unveils New IDOL-Based HP TRIM Enterprise Records Management Solution: Autonomy Unveils New IDOL-Based HP TRIM Enterprise Records Management Solution. 14, 2011 Autonomy, an HP Company , today unveiled its new release of HP TRIM enterprise records management solution. Autonomy IDOL enables HP TRIM 7.2 to automatically index all relevant information, and form an understanding of all conceptually related content and topics within both unstructured and structured information.