NARA's Budget To Increase

John W. Carlin

I am pleased to report that the new fiscal year 2001 budget for the National Archives and Records Administration has provided all the funding we had requested--including some important items for those of you who regularly use the records and materials we hold.

With our new budget of $316,918,000, we will be able to improve the care of records we already have, some of which date back to the nation's birth, as well as prepare for the electronic records of our increasingly digital government. This new budget will allow us to advance major initiatives to:

  • improve records management in the Federal Government;
  • meet special challenges posed by electronic records;
  • expand public access to records; and
  • preserve growing quantities of records.

Everyone who uses records and cares about them owes the President and the Congress great thanks for this extraordinary support of our mission. Republicans and Democrats both supported funding increases to enable us to continue the great progress we've been making toward the goals in our Strategic Plan.

Here are some highlights of the budget of significance to historians.

The major increase in the budget is $88,000,000 to complete the renovation of the original National Archives Building in Washington, DC. The work will include correcting mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire safety deficiencies; retrofitting the Rotunda to display America's Charters of Freedom (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights) in new encasements currently under preparation; bringing the building into full compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act; upgrading storage conditions to meet modern archival standards; and providing sufficient exhibit and public-use space to accommodate increasing numbers of visitors.

New funding also will allow us to begin work on a new Southeast regional archives facility in Atlanta, make improvements at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, MI, and repair the leaking plaza at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

For expanding public access to records, the budget includes increases for declassification, records processing, and our web site.

Specifically, we will be able to declassify more records and review more agency classification programs as a result of increases in the staff for the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), which NARA chairs, and our own Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).

We will add to the staff of the Clinton Presidential Materials Project in Little Rock, AR, which has taken custody of and has started processing records of the Clinton Administration, so we can begin to open records and make them searchable in compliance with the Presidential Records Act. The records are being housed in our temporary location in downtown Little Rock until the Clinton Presidential Library opens in a few years.

We will enhance our online offerings to researchers by adding staff to enable us to redesign our web site http://www.nara.gov/, to improve the content available on the site, and to develop more content for researchers of all kinds.

We will continue to be able to make important grants for historical research through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, NARA's grant-making affiliate. The commission received $450,000 for one-time, directed grants in addition to $6 million for its competitive grant program.

Most significantly for the future, this budget includes the seed money for the development of an Electronic Records Archives (ERA). We will be adding high-level professionals to our staff to advance our research and development partnerships on this exciting project.

With base funding plus the new addition, NARA will continue working toward ERA within the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure. Through this partnership, the San Diego Supercomputer Center has produced prototype demonstrations for preserving large volumes of electronic records such as email messages in a relatively short time. We will continue research toward building an archives that can preserve any kind of electronic record indefinitely, free from dependence on any specific hardware or software, and enable customers to retrieve the electronic records they need on computer systems now in use and coming in the future.

The entire Federal Government has a stake in this investment in ERA and the payoff could extend well beyond the Federal Government. While the ERA we are planning should enable us to preserve and make available millions of electronic records created by the Federal Government, the technology promises to be useful as well to other Federal agencies in managing their electronic records. Also, the ERA will give increased reality to E-government, and its structure can be adapted by other kinds of archives, libraries, agencies, and businesses regardless of size.

Clearly, the Congress and the Administration have recognized the importance of our services and our ability to deliver. We are grateful and truly excited to be able to take major additional steps in carrying out our mission to ensure ready access to essential evidence, documenting the rights and entitlements of citizens, the actions for which Federal officials are accountable, and the nation's historical experience.