List of weather records

Transcription

>> Thank you for joining us for, You Want it How? This is a records methods seminar delivered by the United States National Archives and Records Administrations National Records Management Training Program. In this session, Richard Rayburn [phonetic] discusses how to transfer permanent records to the National Archives and Records Administration. Now let's join the seminar. >> Now I think I will pass it over to Mr. Jeff Benson [phonetic] who will tell us a little bit about Mr. Richard Rayburn and then Rich will get started. >> Okay thank you, Paula. Welcome everybody. I love this introduction and hopefully this process won't seem that complicated to you, although I think you may have missed a couple steps in there but I'll let him talk about that. Our speaker today is Richard Rayburn. He's been with NARA, just hit the 20 year mark, on October 4. Those of you who are familiar with the NARA Organization, once I list some of the things that Richard has been doing at NARA, because he's covered a lot of different bases at NARA itself. During his 20 year period he was a naval records specialist, reference archivist, a move coordinator, an archives director and a records management director. Richard is based in Atlanta. He's currently a specialist with the permanent records capture team and that's why he's our presenter today. So without further ado, I'll turn it over to Richard Rayburn. >> Thank you, Jeff, and thank everybody for coming this afternoon. I'm sure, like a lot of y'all, I'm kind of suffering from post furlough stress syndrome and trying to get things back together. I was actually in the process of kind of tweaking this when we went out on furlough. We had a session scheduled right at that time. So we'll try and wade through this again and make sure we cover our bases and get everybody a little bit more happy about transferring their permanent papers to the National Archives and Records Administration and we'll try and stay on time with this presentation today. First off is why are we here? Well we're here today because permanent records are special. They're special to those of you who work in federal agencies and those of us in the National Archives. And what we really want to do is try and help give you a little better guidance on how to prepare your paper records in particular for transfer to the National Archives and into the custody and control of the National Archives. We won't touch on electronic records. That will be a later session. I know most of you will be eager to discuss that as well. But we'll work with our electronic records office in order to come up with a presentation about those. Today we'll talk about paper because some of the issues around paper now are very pressing as those of you who work in the field agencies know. Exactly how are permanent records special? Well they are special because upon transfer to the National Archives, they are retained forever, well mostly. It's true that records can be deaccessioned if we find they are not heavily used or perhaps inadequately scheduled 30 or 40 or 50 years ago and in some cases they've been transferred, they might be temporary transferred by mistake. But mostly records that come across to the custody of National Archives, are maintained forever or until filed to the public. Or I was just looking at a NASA record schedule yesterday and the schedule item actually used the infinity marking for the retention, which I thought was pretty cute. You don't see that very often. But that's basically why these records, current records, are special. They're coming across to the National Archives and we're going to maintain them until the republic falls, basically. Permanent records are special in other ways, they're special because they're stored in different conditions then records you transfer to a federal records center or perhaps even a commercial storage center. In the National Archives, once they're accessioned into the custody of the National Archives, they're stored in climate controlled conditions, special media could be stored in cold storage units down to 36 degrees and basically maintained in those conditions at a constant temperature. Treatment, if you have current records and they're transferred to the custody of the National Archives, in most instances they will be rehoused in archival containers and if needed they'll receive conservation treatment. Descriptions, records that are transferred to the National Archives will receive archival descriptions. A lot of you are familiar with ARC or what is now known as OPA and the archival descriptive catalog that the National Archives uses. The archivist within the National Archives will take your records and provide better descriptions. If needed they will update finding aids as well. Access, barring restrictions on your records and recognize your restrictions, these records will be made available to the public and the public can come in and view the records or if they're online they can have online access to them. And it's very important that access be maintained for these records. Permanent records are so special, in a lot of cases agencies really haven't transferred them to us. Everybody loves cool records, maps, photos, drawings, all kinds of neat stuff you want to retain in your offices because they're very important or they're those legal documents that your general counselors office feels that you can never, ever, ever, ever part with and they'll maintain them on site. And a lot of agencies have maintained their records. So it became a problem and has become a problem over the past, oh, 20, 30 years. And so we asked the president, President Obama, to lend us a hand and he did. The Presidential Records Narrative Directive, NARA/OMB M-12-18 was issued and Section 2.2 addresses permanent records specifically and it says by 2013 a senior agency records officer will ensure that permanent records that have been in existence more than 30 years will be identified for transfer and reporting to NARA. Now let me make it clear that you do not have to transfer your records right away. This is only a mandate that you identify the records and let us know they're there. Some agencies have already reported back to us, have gone out and looked and have sent in records identifications to our group, the Permanent Records Capture Unit, which is very much appreciated. So some agencies want to go ahead and transfer these records and that's great. We want you to transfer your records. We do want permanent records into the custody of National Archives but we also want them in good order. We don't want people to transfer their permanent records to us willy nilly. They go out to a warehouse, they discover them there, they're in a Conex trailer out in the middle of a national forest and all of a sudden you're like, oh, we need to get rid of these records. Just bear in mind that we'd like to have you get a little order and that the average retention period for permanent records is 20 years. So in most cases we're getting the records a long time after they've been in use. And for better or for worse they could be inadequately described we've indexed and there could have been a lot that happened to the records over that time. That places the burden on you as the current federal employee who handles these records but it also places the burden on us. So at the National Archives we need to work with you specifically in order to make sure the records come across to us in good order. It helps us and eventually it helps the tax payers as well. So and just to reiterate, a lot can happen in 20 years. Here's the famous Indiana Jones photo and I'll just remind everybody, that is not the National Archives. We do have a better grip on where our records are and they don't tend to disappear into a black hole. But once you want to transfer your records, there're going to be two ways that you can transfer permanent paper records to the National Archives once they've met a retention date, via a direct offer or ERA, and most of you on a phone call or Feds and you'll understand that ERA stands for Electronic Records Administration. Some of you already use it transfer records. You can do direct offers, what National Archives calls direct offers. Those are records in your custody, in the custody of your agency that are probably out in your offices that are past their retention period. You can offer those directly to us. They don't have to go to a federal record center but again they need to be in good order. Many of you maintain your records in an FRC, a Federal Records Center, and you receive transfer information from our annual move group, or annual move project, and that comes in to you via ERA. So that's the two ways you can transfer records to us basically. Now the issues with some of the transfers, particularly out of the Federal Records Center over the years, most of you are familiar with the Standard Form 135, that's when you do your initial transfer of records. Again, this might be filled out 20 years before somebody actually takes a good hard look at it in order to transfer the records into the Custody of the National Archives. So in some instances we're having problems with the standard form 135. I'll have you look down in the right hand corner of it. You'll see the last revision on this was done in 1985. That's a long time ago. There is some talk within the FRC of creating a different standard 135 for permanent records, which would require a little bit more information regarding those records and how they are transformed into the FRC's. That's only, that's something that's being discussed. It's not really in any basic shape to go forward right now. But most of you have looked at this, the 135, as for your record group, you should know your agency record group, the year you're assigned an accession number, the volume, the box number. Then line 6F in the middle says your series description, restrictions on your records, your scheduling authority and disposal dates, locations, etcetera. The filling out this form is very important to the Federal Records Center. Of course they review it but there is some information that typically gets left out and that's particularly in 6F of the records data area, series description. If you read the 135 instructions, it's actually asking you for more information. In a lot of cases we don't get that information for agency. And this is what really worries our ARC units. You get a series description, office or organization of creation is what they really want, restrictions other than national security, this could be CUI, sensitive but unclassified, FOIA, PII, having special media in there, includes the dates. But don't get too crazy about your dates. You know you just want some inclusive dates. But filling this out properly is sometimes a problem with agencies. And again you have people who may shorthand this information and this causes problems down the road, particularly for paper. So what can you do to help this? Well you need to use the 135 in order to transfer your records into an FRC. But what you can do is append a very good folder title list to that 135. That will help with the information. All of you who transfer records to the FRC probably append some type of box list as they're called, folder list. But what we're talking about here is really a folder-title list that goes down into a little bit more detail. NARA, we don't really have a specific format for this list so we kind of, our group, the permanent records capture section, kind of goof around with this and in association with the research services units in College Park, and developed just a kind of a template. Now this is in Excel so it's a little bit difficult to see on PowerPoint so we'll break it out into a couple of slides. But this is just a template that you can use as an Excel. You can shift this if you would like to. The information on it can be static. It asks you for certain information regarding your records within your agency. You could add fields to it if you need to or basically tweak the fields if you so desire. But this gives you a nice template of what we would look for. You can use this for an FRC transfer and to the Federal Records Center or even for direct offer later into the electronic records administration. And here's a little breakout of it, to give you a better sense of what's there. Top is record group, agency name, major subdivision or minor, some people like to go even further down into a tertiary level but that can get a little bit too much into overkill and most times going down two offices is good, inconclusive dates for your restrictions, CUI or you can change this to anything, PII, any types of restrictions that you like to put in there. Our units needs to know the restrictions and we'll talk about that a little bit later. Associated finding aid, do you have a database, an index, something that goes with the records? If yes, the name, type and location of the finding aid. Alternate copies of the files, do you have the records scanned or microfilmed? If yes, where are they? Where are they located? Special media, do the records contain photos, CD's, DVD's, drawings? If yes we'd need to notify the FRC in order so that they can address it or the alternate unit for guidance. Mixed media within record series can cause trouble, as most of you know, transfers later on contain that media, could need media attention. And their disposal at disposition authority, that's basically your schedule, your NARA issued schedule signed by the archivist United States. If you have an agency manual we would like the citation for that as well and hopefully it does link to a valid NARA disposition authority. Your series description, we'll talk about that, you can get that from your disposition, a brief description of the records. And then over in the corner just some general information, dates and FRC, just some basic information about the records themselves. Page 2, this would just be an amendment to this again. This is just a very simple folder title list. Most of you know how to fill out. It's not rocket science but it can be time consuming to fill one out correctly. Box number, file or case number, are you using some type of file system? Are you using some type of decimal file system on the record that we might need to know? The folder title itself, the start date and the end date. Additional information you could give us about the records that will help us 20 years later. Any comments you would like to make about the records themselves. Why is this stuff important to NARA and why is it important to you as you think about it and as you're working with records today? I work with records daily and sometimes I don't give them much thought and that's true anywhere. You're working with your records, you're working with your case files, you're filing them, you're putting them into boxes and you're not really thinking about it and what's going to happen on down the road. Again, as the catch phrase is nowadays, you just kick the can down the road and figure somebody will take care of that later on. That can be costly to all of us. One thing is a record group number, each of you should know your record group within the federal agency and the federal community. They can change. Assigned by NARA, unique number for each agency but it can change. If you are a member of the USAOC, the Administrative Office of the Courts, you'll know that record group 21, which used to cover all courts, is now broken into two. There's a record group for bankruptcy court records. But everything that was put in under RG21 now needs to change to RG578 so record groups can change. Don't think that what you write today could be the same thing so make sure if you put the number you also put the title of your agency on it there. Agency names, fairly static but agencies can be abolished or renamed. Our friends at the Federal Highway Administration used to be the Bureau of Public Roads. Those of you in the Department of Homeland Security know that a lot of your agencies were brought into that new agency when it was created and that names changed very drastically in a lot of cases there. So again be sure and spell the name out. We do have registers of group numbers but it is helpful to have it spelled out. Never assume that your name won't change, the agency name won't change. Down when you're starting to talk about offices, major agency subdivision, again, it can change and they do change frequently. I don't know how many of y'all are undergoing a transformation here at the National Archives right now so I'll use us as an example but a lot of you have probably been through agency transformations within your own agencies. Whenever possible, don't use acronyms. We use acronyms all the time in the government. ERA, AOUSC, I just said several, if you're going to write it down on a 135 that may not be seen for 20 years, be sure and spell it out. I used to be in a unit called NR, it's actually Office of Regional Records Services. Who would know what NR is 20 years later if I just wrote it down or just used the acronym NR? Minor agency subdivisions, I was in a field unit, Atlanta Archives, our acronym then was NRC. Well you might think that's Neutral Regulatory Commission 20 years later or there's a corporate unit, NRC. So you just want to be careful with acronyms and make sure you kind of spell them out and allow people to understand what you are talking about. I know that when I first came to Atlanta years ago we had a lot of NASA records here, also CDC. CDC, we kept agency charts, office organization charts, because they changed so frequently in their 16 centers. And you basically had to have a chart for year to year to see what was going on with your records and a lot of times they didn't use acronyms, or full names in those charts, they used acronyms and you physically had to look at the records in order to figure out where they came from. Anyway, NASA, which changed a lot in terms of what units are doing. Inclusive dates, these are needed for transferring description purposes, again I think people a lot of times were bogged down on the dates oh gosh, it's got to be right on the month and the year down to the day, if I know it. Give us bulk dates if you need to, particularly if you're out looking in an office, you're doing an office clean up to report to us under 2.2, the Presidential Records Directive, and you can't figure out whether it's 1870 to 1930, you know, it's fine. Just kind of get it in the ballpark. It's better to at least know kind of a decade. Restriction exemptions, again, let us know what restrictions and exemptions are there. This protects the interests of your agency and alerts NARA staff to issues in the records. There's nothing like 20 years later going out to a shelf and discovering national classification restrictions on record, seeing top secret in a box or secret, confidential, this always makes the records archivists hair stand on end because you can get in a difficult situation and eventually you have to come back to your agency and figure out what's going on so it causes everybody difficulty. So in your transfers always let us know what restriction and what exemptions you have for the records. Controlled classified information and also things such as PII or sensitive or unclassified, these are types of regulations and restrictions that are placed on records a lot of times by your agency or by Congressional restrictions or legal restrictions on the records. If there are long term restrictions, please let us know about them. We need to know what the information is on say CUI, NASA's famous CUI instances ITAR, International Trade agreement restrictions. DOE has a thing called UNI, Uncontrolled Nuclear Information, we just need to know what these are. NARA maintains a registry but we are not basically the people who would weigh in on how these things are applied to your records. If you have issues or want to know what's going on, contact your records officer or your general counsel's office or if you have an access coordinator for your records and your agency, contact them as well. In the National Archives we have an access coordinator, whom I actually talked to about this presentation, who helps us figure out what restrictions are placed on records. But if there are longstanding restrictions, grand jury, we've seen grand jury records come in, those are closed in perpetuity. We don't really want grand jury records. There's nothing we can do with grand jury records. We need to know about that so that somebody is not surprised 20 years later or risks fines, fees or actually jail time for allowing people to see these records. Again, the what NARA really pushes for is open access to records but we will abide by the restrictions that your agency places on the records within the limits of the exemptions. Associated finding aids, have you created databases and indexes to gain access to your records? If so we'd like to have them. There can be problems with finding aids. I'll show you an example of that later. But if you create a database that gets you into the records and gets you into the records quickly, that is what we would like to have. In some instances they can be a homegrown programming type activity that may not transfer to the National Archives so we would like to look at them just to see if they'll work with the programming capabilities that we have within the National Archives. Alternate copies, have you scanned and microfilmed your records? If so they could be designated the record copy. We might need to schedule the new records but if you can transfer electronic or scans to us, that's welcomed as well. Again, NARA is tight on space for paper records so we do like to take in electronic records or special media if we can. Special media is always an issue. We need to talk about the volume and type whenever you transfer records in. Make sure you designate special media carefully on your 135 and your Excel spreadsheets if you fill them out, so that we can talk about those over time. Again, the worst thing that can happen is you transfer delicate special media into a Federal Record Center and it sits there for 25 years in difficult conditions and deteriorates. By the time the archival unit sees it, it could be just a mass of melted plastic. So please designate your special media. Phew, yeah, phew is right, disposition authority, everybody should be well acquainted with their schedules and the schedules, as you all know, change over time. Our team, permanent records capture section, is actually compiling all permanent authorities that have been created by federal agencies since 1974. Right now we're up to about 10,000. We estimate anywhere between 20,000 and 30,000 permanent authorities have been created by permanent federal agencies over the years. In the old days you would get a schedule that's like this NOAA schedule here. This is actually a brand new one written by a colleague of mine out in Chicago. This is the approved schedule and it also cross references to a manual item number, 1406-5.1 and make sure you spell that out clearly for us. This is very important to the reference archivist years later. ERA now is loading, and this is part of our project within the current records capture section, is we will load the legacy schedule permanent items into ERA. That way people can see them. But right now it's very important to just kind of get them in. This live schedule would be on ERA. That gives you the ability to go in and read a description like this. That also gives our archivists 20 years from now the ability to also read this. Item 1, that's your description, that's your record series description that you can basically cut and paste and put in your 135 or your Excel spreadsheet. Also my colleague, Steiger, [phonetic] wrote a traditional archival type description for these records that you can also cut and paste. An archivist years later could use this as a description for the records for the surface weather observations. Nowadays you have big bucket schedules that would move away from this scheduled item type structure but the big buckets for permanent record should still give you some type of information about the series that's being transferred that's a little more in depth, some of them do not, if they do not, consult with your records officer and your program unit in order to try and come up with a better description. This is particularly crucial for paper and electronic that's been around for years and years. Nobody is going to be able to go back and recreate, without a lot of hassle, what was in the records 20 years ago. So trying to get these series descriptions, particularly for permanent, is important and it's important to the archival units our archival units going forward and also your own people. If you need call back records for FOIA or you need to have a look at records in terms of organizational events over time, it will be easier to get at the records in order to access the permanent ones. Disposition, paper manuscript records not scanned, permanent, so this also, the schedule also gives your disposition, on these records, for the weather records observation, 75 years so that would be a long time away for somebody to go out, these records would sit on a shelf for 75 years and then somebody is going to have to go out and figure out whether they're eligible for transfer to the National Archives. And truthfully a lot can happen in 75 years. It may be that somebody goes and looks at them and says hey, we need to reschedule these. We don't think they're permanent. That can also happen if you go out. A lot of you looking at your records now. Under 2.2 may be determining that we need to have another look at these records and we're not opposed to that either. Now I'll just give you some examples of folder title lists that we got in. These are just over the past year or so and show you what can come in from an agency, what can happen and then I'll show you some that we've kind of fixed. Here's a folder title. This we got during FY13 from a court. If you opened that 135 or looked at that attachment in ARCIS 20 years later, is this going to be very helpful to an archivist or even somebody in your agency trying to review these records to see if they are indeed permanent and if they are eligible for transfer? I look at this and I'm thinking nope. This is not very helpful. I do know, having dealt with court records for a long time, this is a civil case. It was created in 1998. It's number 8,031 and it's probably nine folders of information plus seven folders of exhibits but beyond that I really don't know anything. Number nine is probably the division within the court district but I don't really know anything beyond that. So information that comes to us like this is just not very helpful at all and it will force somebody to go out and look at that. Now if we had a docket for this we might be able to match the court docket information to this but again we're talking an extensive search in order to figure that out so again it's just not very helpful and it's time consuming and costs money. Here's a transfer we got form the Corp of Engineers and here's one that's actually filled out for you and this person did a pretty good job filling it out, RG77, this is transfer number 282. This tells me its real property historical files. Okay it gives me some inclusive dates. Restrictive use by agency personnel only. That's good for one that's in the federal records center. I went out and looked up his disposal authority using [inaudible] and I could look up A40590H1 and it was indeed permanent. So I was like well wait, we've got some information here. It doesn't really have a series description for me but I can go to [inaudible] and kind of download that series description and see what I need to see. So I can do a little work and figure this out. He's given me some inclusive dates. They're not too bad. I see it's World War II records which could be of some interest. So now I go to the folder title list that was submitted and suddenly I'm confused because we're talking about Rockford Ordinance Plant's Illinois Audit Files and my thinking is that these are maybe contract audit files. I'm not quite sure. Are they permanent? Should they be permanent? Do I need to go out and look at these things? In and of itself the folder title list isn't so bad. It doesn't give me a lot of information but it gives me enough to kind of get a researcher where they want to go 20 years later. But the one thing that I question immediately is again, audit files, I'm not quite sure what they mean. Typically contract audit files are temporary. So I went out and I grabbed these records and I thought well I'll use these as an example for the class and I filled out the 135 that we had created and I sent you as a sample. This is RG77. It's Corp of Engineers. I discovered that is was Great Lakes in Ohio River Division and that's within the Louisville district. The dates were 40 to 77. It didn't have any exemptions on it. It didn't have any restricted information or CUI in it and it did not have a finding aid or database. I guess I could say that the original 135 is a finding aid but not so great a finding aid. And then are there alternate? Well yes. When I opened up the file it said that these records had been scanned. And I was like oh, hurray. But it didn't tell me where they were and it gives me an acronym that I have no clue. I can tell it's Corp of Engineer, Louisville something PMME. There's no way I'm going to be able to figure that out unless I call Louisville and track somebody down there who can tell me what that is and whether I could get a copy of the scans. So that's the kind of thing that's a danger of acronyms that you run into years later. It didn't really have any special media of aggregation, special media that I was really worried about. And then I put the transfer information. It had an ARCIS transfer number. It's not a direct dial. And then the number of boxes and the types of box. Then also I just took, I basically cut and pasted this information from AR and just dropped it into my spreadsheet, my Excel spreadsheet, and that took me, it was a lot harder to get into [inaudible] and find this than it was to cut and paste it but I did find it. And it gave me enough information that I went to the original NARA schedule and matched that up to make sure that the manual citation matched the schedule. Sounds like a lot of work but it probably took me 10 minutes. The folder title list itself, I have worked with Corp Engineer records and real property records before so I know in some instances what researchers are looking for. Most of these records are valuable for [inaudible] or formally utilized sites. A lot of times the Corp of Engineers is going in to clean up these sites or they're environmental issues so people want to know a lot more about these files then just is it Mayo General Hospital or George Field Radio Range Station. And so I just did a few, I did a whole box. It took me about an hour to do the whole box. And again I know what I'm looking for so it was a little faster for me but your folks could do it, if you're talking permanent records and saving everybody time, could probably do it fairly quickly as well. Most the time people want to know what state, what county, what city? What they're trying to get at is where are these facilities? Are there drawings, are there photos, are there anything in there that help me do a site cleanup years later? And what period was this facility occupied? As you can see here, one down about four is a tank arsenal so somebody probably interested in that, also the ordinance facility. So those are the types of things you're looking for in a file folder list. If it's permanent records, take your time and expend a little time on it. Again, I also realize that you're going to have to look at these, you know, 20 years later or 25 or 30 or 35 so you want to give people enough information that I can open this right up and say to myself, yes, these are very important records or I know that they're used by federal agencies and researchers quite a bit. Here's another one that came in. This has a declass number on it so I know that these records were declassified in 1986. I'm very happy about that. As I process the records I will use that declassification number in order to put it on my boxes so that somebody who comes from our office to review the records years later can see that there was a declass job that was done on these records. These were declassified by the National Archives. These are confidential correspondence. And this is under the old famous Navy filing manual, A2 Administrative Records. This is what they used to give to a researcher once these were declassified. As you can see it's very vague so we took it and broke it out. And here as an archival unit took this and created this finding aid to help people get into these records more readily. Again, you'll see they took it out, in the old days we'd hand somebody a file manual and say here's A162, that's what it says. This unit just took it and probably cut and pasted it and then hit control apostrophe and just copied it all the way down, A162. They gave you the subject of what's in the file plus a month and a year. This opened up these records to research quite a bit so that now people are interested in them. You can post this on the internet, online and everybody gets to have a look at it and that drives people to the records, makes us happy and makes people happy that they've gotten access to the records. In the old format, that very difficult to get people to the record or get them interested in the records. Now here's a database that was created for railroad retirement board records. This was created by the agency for use in retrieving records. You can see a claim file. No location numbers. As you can see, this is a working finding aid. This is what an agency created. All they kind of wanted to know was a last name and a first name, date of birth and they don't, in a lot of case they don't even put a consistent date of death in there and all they want to know is a claim file. This is fine. We had long discussions with the railroad retirement board about new use of social security numbers and I'll show you the next slide that will have them unveiled. But as it is this is okay. But in an archival unit we may take it in and tweak this a little bit. As you can see there are two Moore's. Using an initial is not great. It's okay but what if you had 14 Smiths there? That could be a problem. And again, we would want to be a little more fine on the dates of birth and the dates of death. This is why we had the long discussions. So there are the social security numbers. Now in the National Archives we basically would release these numbers because these folks are dead. And this is why we had all these discussions with the railroad retirement board. These are people all deceased within this database. And NARA still holds by the basic tenant that the dead have no rights to privacy. Now we don't get crazy about that. There are certain things that even on these we would review the files for medical information sent to the medical information but typically we would release this database with social security numbers unrevealed. Even here if I put it out on YouTube we would probably cloak the social security numbers because our access staff doesn't want 500 phone calls from concerned citizens that the National Archives is suddenly releasing social security numbers so again, we've had long conversations over this type of information. But it's a good database as it stands. It's a work database for an agency to do its work. If I was talking to the agency when they were creating this, I would have said well, can you be a little better about the information you're collecting? So that's as a records officer or person who's doing program units on a daily basis, those are the types of conversations you want to have if you go out and look at electronic media, files creation, even data dumps on files, remind your offices that somebody has to look at these one day and it's not helpful to use name, April and a file name, a file folder named April on the same shared drive. It causes confusion for everybody. Okay so we're heading into the home stretch and you've created a great folder title list and I have confidence that anybody can create a great folder title list. Heck, if I can, anybody can do it. And after years of experience I have made every mistake you can possibly make trying to create a folder title list. The wonderful thing about Excel and most of the spreadsheets that we use nowadays is that you can go back and correct them fairly easily, even the 135 that I use as an example, every time I look at it, I change it so it's a little bit crazy but luckily electronic media, even though it can be a hassle at times, it is very forgiving. You're not rolling a sheet of paper back in the typewriter to fix something. So you can create a great folder title list and then transfer your current records to the National Archive. Now how hard is that? Well it's not that hard. If you choose to store your records in a Federal Records Center you can attach your spreadsheet to that 135, you can mail it, email it, fax it or wherever to the appropriate Federal Records Center in your area or the one you use. We're a little more carefree about where records are stored these days. But you can literally fill out that electronic Excel spreadsheet and just attach it to that 135. You still need to use the 135. We're not going to eliminate that. But it can be there and you can review it in ARCIS as well. It can be viewed in ARCIS which is a great feature which I hope gets better and better. If you're transferring legal custody of your records to NARA, use ERA, Electronic Records Administration. You can attach a spreadsheet to your ERA transfer or PR, everybody is using PR now. And if you need guidance about transferring records, I won't give you an ERA session here. Lord knows I could probably use another one. But you can go to archives.gov/records-mgmt/accessioning/. There is a manual, an agency manual there that once I got used to it, it's actually pretty good. So it can show you how to attach things in ERA. You can attach these spreadsheets in ERA. It's got a little twist that can be kind of tricky. Here's kind of a blurry attachment page. You'll see on the attachment that is highlighted in blue. The only issue with attaching something in ERA in Excel Spreadsheet, here you'll see I did a premium national forest, Excel spreadsheet for the forest service in order to do a direct offer for them, is that it does not give you a message that your file has been uploaded. So I ended up attaching that I think six different times before I finally figured out I had to go back out and come back in. So just be aware that it is attaching your file, it's just not giving you the file uploaded message that you want to see. But it's there. I went and clicked on it before the furlough and by golly it still opened up and I was pleased as punch. A note about classified records, if you're going to transfer classified records or if you deal with classified records that need to be transferred, don't transfer classified records by ERA. Do it the old way on what's called the old SF-258, which is still around for these types of things. You have to fill out a form NA 14130 prior to transferring permanent classified records to NARA. And you can talk to them about this, the supervisor in that unit. His name is Don Mackelwon. [phonetic] He loves to talk about classified records and transferring them in and you can use this address to get to their website and they will assist you on this process and also in filling out this form. Here it is, the checklist form 14130. And they can give you information about this. In order to fill this out you're going to need to work with your records officer and the program office in a lot of cases. So this is the checklist form. Some of you probably already used it. And just remember, you're making history. Your agency is making history. But the legacy of your work is the permanent records that you transfer into the national archives. We maintain those records. We take care of the records. And even if we get them in a bad state, we will attempt to get the public into those records as best we can. But it's very important to think ahead when you're working with current records in your agency on a day to day basis. If you're going to retire records to the Federal Records Center or you're coming across records that are past their retention within your agency, the question you want to ask yourself is how can I get these records to the public and the National Archives so that they can review the records 20, 25, 100 years from now without great expense to the tax payer or causing an archivist to basically rework the records all the way through? To create one of those file folder lists like that Navy one I showed you a few slides ago basically takes about 13 hours per cubic foot, if you're doing a very intense description and trying to correct the records as you go along, reboxing, refoldering, doing archival descriptions, doing the finding aid. That costs taxpayers a lot of money. So any upfront work that's done on the records is very helpful on down the road. So now if you need help or advice or you know questions you can contact us at the permanent records capture section or reference unit or research unit in College Park also have an online presence. There's a tab on our records site for transferring permanent records, accessioning records so you can go there as well. Or you can contact our supervisor, Matt Eidson and he will help you as well and get you to where you need to go. But just remember try and do the best with your records. If they're in different formats, let us know and we'd love to have the permanent records in the National Archives. And that is the end. >> Okay Casey says once the records are at NARA, how do we request retrieval of the record later? Once you transfer your records to the legal custody in National Archives, basically we're loathed to send them back to the agency unless you have some very solid reason as to why you need them. We do loans back to agencies but it's on a very limited basis. We do find that people have trouble turning over their current records to us and once we lend them back to us, they have even more trouble sending them back so a lot of times you want to be able to access your records while they're in the Federal Records Center. They're still in your custody. Microfiche that's very, very old, is it so old that you couldn't have it converted to some type of electronic scan, if your microfiche is very brittle and there's something you know that's really wrong with it, you may be able to find a little bit of money to transfer it. I know they can put it, I think it can be scanned now so you might want to check on that. If you're going to maintain it locally, make sure you get it in some type of colored storage unit. As long as they're readable and you can slap it on a microfiche reader, they should be okay. But I'd have to know what kind of state they're in before I could really answer you completely. >> Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you to Rich. Thank you to the Permanent Records Capture team. Thank you to Jeff and the rest of the training team who help put this on. And thank you so much to all of you. We look forward to seeing you online in the future and hope that you found this presentation to be helpful. >> Thank you all. >> Thank you for joining us. We hope you found this seminar useful. For more information about the U.S. National Records Management Training Program, please visit www.archives.gov. Also our current workshop schedule for both face to face and web based training is available online at NARA.learn.com.