President Barack Obama is pressing for the government to use digital record-keeping systems more in an effort to save money and make them more accessible to the public. The president’s plans represent the biggest change in federal archiving since President Harry S. Truman,
The Washington Post’s Federal Eye blog reported.
The National Archives and Records Administration, which stores about 475 million pages of digital records a years, has warned that federal agencies are falling behind with Federal Records Act deadlines to digitize. Obama is set to announce that the agencies have four months to come up with plans to make records “more cost-effective and accessible to the public and on transitioning from paper-based records to electronic records where appropriate,” the Post reported.
A key goal of digital record keeping is to save money, but Anne Weismann, with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, warned that the effort will cost money, too. “The big question is where agencies will come up with the necessary funds to make the transfer to electronic record keeping,” she told the Post.
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