The National Archives and Records Administration(NARA) is beginning the operations and maintenance phase of its Electronic Records Archive (ERA) system--a program that just wrapped up 6 years of development. IBM (NYSE: IBM) will handle operations and management of the system, under a 10-year, $240 million contract NARA awarded the company Sept. 30. 

But the development phase may not be entirely over, considering numerous "high-priority fixes" NARA says it will focus on in the next year. ERA capabilities may be outstanding because ERA development phase 5 was cut short as the project went over budget. In December 2010 NARA decided it would halt ERA development Sept. 30, 2011 and end its contract with Lockheed Martin.

According to Director of NARA's Life Cycle Management Division Laurence Brewer's slides (.pdf) from an Oct. 4 meeting "corrective and adaptive ERA maintenance" will focus on:

• Improving the public's access to e-records through On-line Public Access;
• Increasing NARA's flexibility in electronic data publishing to OPA;
• Making record submission more streamlined, scalable, reliable and flexible;
• Improving record findability for NARA staff; 
• Improving processes for capturing, storing and updating metadata across instances and systems; and
• Improving ERA architecture to make it more scalable, evolvable and cost-effective. 

Last spring, NARA's Archivist David Ferriero said federal electronic records archiving was in crisis and that it was NARA's most important challenge. While speaking at a March 18 event, Ferriero compared the electronic record overhaul to the situation faced by the first archivist, Robert Connor, in 1934.

Connor discovered "a horrendous situation, where records had been stored in attics and garages, and flooded and fires and stolen and destroyed," said Ferriero. "The analogy just became very clear to me that we're in the same kind of situation around electronic records...My situation is very similar to what Connor faced."

For more:
- see the FierceGovernment article

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Paper is still alive and well at ARMA 2010