Originally Broadcast on February 18, 2013

Arlington, VA

Welcome to The Business of Government Hour, a conversation about management with a government executive who is changing the way government does business. The Business of Government Hour is produced by The IBM Center for The Business of Government which was created in 1998 to encourage discussion and research into new approaches to improving government effectiveness. You can find out more about the center by visiting us on the web at businessofgovernment.org

And now, The Business of Government Hour.

Michael Keegan: Welcome to The Business of Government Hour. I'm Michael Keegan, your host, and managing editor of The Business of Government Magazine.

The National Archives is more than just the nation's record keeper and protector of records. It is the steward of the American story that preserves the past to protect the future. The records it holds are the original sources of that story, documenting the collective history of our nation through the actions of individuals and institutions. Every day, the National Archives and Records Administration touches the lives of people all over the nation, from the visitors who come to see the Constitution to the government officials seeking assistance in managing their records of their agencies. Yet changes in the federal government, in our society, and in the nature of records themselves drive the National Archives to change the way it does business and how it addresses the needs of the choosers.

How is the National Archives transforming the way it does business? What about its digitization strategy, and how can you become a citizen archivist? We will explore these questions and so much more with our very special guest, David Ferriero, archivist of the United States.

David, welcome to the show. It's great to have you.

David Ferriero: Great to be here, thanks.

Michael Keegan: Also joining our conversation from IBM is Paul Kayatta.

Paul, welcome.

Paul Kayatta: Thanks very much. Good to see you, Michael.

Michael Keegan: So, David, whenever I have a conversation with a guest, I like to set some context, and that usually is around providing us with a bridge overview of the history and evolving mission of the National Archives and Records Administration. When was it created, and how has its mission evolved to date?

David Ferriero: It's kind of interesting that it took this country so long to create a national archives. There had been discussions as early as the end of the Continental Congress. There's this wonderful conversation of Jeremiah Clark, the representative from New York, asking the question, what shall we do with the journals. Shall we burn them lest they fall into the wrong hands? And they left the decision up to George Washington to decide what to do with them, and, thank God, George Washington said, I think we better keep them.

So it wasn't until FDR, actually, the Roosevelt Administration that the country actually got serious about creating a national archives, and he created the National Archives and the presidential library system at the same time. So in 1935, our doors opened and that was the beginning.

I was getting ready for my confirmation hearing, reading everything that the very first archivist of the United States wrote about what he was up against when he was actually creating the National Archives. Robert Connor, a faculty member at Chapel Hill University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, tells wonderful stories about the state of the records stored in attics and basements all over the city, lots of things lost to fire and theft. There's a wonderful story about the records of the White House that used to be stored in the garage on the White House grounds. There was a fire in the garage and Rutherford B. Hayes was out there on the lawn in a bucket brigade trying to put the fire out. So there's stories like that  about how the records were being treated, and, of course, the British burned the town so the fact that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights were spirited out of town the night before the British burned. It's a miracle that the things we have survived.

So our collection starts with those journals of the Continental Congress, the oath of allegiance signed at Valley Forge by George Washington and his troops, all the way up to the tweets that are being created in the White House as we speak right now.

Michael Keegan: With such an expensive mission, could you give us a sense, operationally, how the National Archives is organized, the size of its budget, the number of FTEs, its sort of geographical footprint?

David Ferriero: Sure. We are 44 facilities from Anchorage, Alaska to Atlanta, Georgia, a collection of about 12 billion pieces of paper at the moment, about 40 million photographs, miles and miles of film and video. The largest growing collection, of course, is electronic records, about 500 terabytes at the moment.

We started collecting electronic records during the Reagan administration, so between the Reagan and the Bush, 41 administrations, we have about 2.5 million e-mail messages, Clinton White House, 20 million, George W. Bush, 210 million e-mail messages so that gives you a snapshot of where we're going with that. There's about 3,200 staff in those 44 facilities, budget of about under 400 million.

Paul Kayatta: I'd like to transition to your specific role. Could you tell us a little bit about the duties and responsibilities of the archivist of the U.S?

David Ferriero: Sure. These are the things that they didn't tell me during the interview. So it's kind of a set of evolving responsibilities as it's been three years now that I've been on the job. I did have an opportunity recently to meet with David Jacobsen, who is the ambassador to Canada, who was working on appointments with the president, and he's the one who hired me so I have had a chance to let him know all the things that he didn't tell me.

We are responsible for the records of the country, so that means all the records of the executive branch, cabinet offices, and departments, so about 275 agencies altogether. We're governed by a set of laws called the Federal Records Act. We are responsible for what's created in the White House under a different set of laws, the Presidential Records Act, courtesy storage for the records of Congress. Congress owns their own records, but we provide storage and retrieval servicing for those records. The Supreme Court records are in our custody. Federal district court records, the reason for the 44 facilities around the country, federal records are primarily in those facilities. So there's the whole management of the creation of records, and the scheduling of those records.

On the federal side, on the agency side, each agency creates a records schedule that kind of describes the kind of records they're creating. They work with my staff to create those record schedules. The records schedules describe how long they stay in the agency and at what point the 2-3 percent that is of historic or legal value gets transferred to the National Archives. And that transfer process is one that's managed by my staff, the National Archives staff. So that's on the federal side.

On the White House side, another group of staff is working closely with the White House Office of Records Management to ensure the records are being created, captured, and preserved so that at the end of the administration, they get transferred to the National Archives. On the presidential side, also, we're responsible for gifts to the president, so the artifacts. Another group of staff is responsible for ensuring that the gifts are recorded and taken care of so they can get transferred at the end of the administration.

At the end of an administration, actually during the inaugural ceremony, my staff is in the White House grabbing the records and transferring them to temporary storage for the next presidential library. That's kind of the basic record keeping piece of the job.

And then there are some other responsibilities that come with the position. We have, within the National Archives, the Information Security Oversight Office which is responsible for classified information, monitoring and working with the agencies around classification guides, and how records are classified. And then just after I started, a new department within the National Archives, the Office of Government and Information Services, which is the FOIA Ombudsman serving the American public book for helping to resolve problems that they're having with their FOIA requests, so it's an additional responsibility that the Archives has taken on.

And then we have a small grant-making wing of the National Archives, the National Historic Preservation Records Commission, which gives grants to states and institutions to preserve, digitize, and make available their records.

Michael Keegan: So, David, as Archivist of the United States, what are your top three challenges you face in your role, and how have you sought to address them?

David Ferriero: Electronic records, electronic records, electronic records. It's clear to say that the biggest challenge, and as you heard just from the magnitude of what we're against, is this transition from paper to electronic, and it's making the paper environment look really good.

Michael Keegan: Well, it's 12 billion I think you said. (Speakers overlapping)

David Ferriero: That's 12 billion; that's right. And I scare my staff when I ask them, how do we know it’s 12 billion? When was the last time we did an inventory? Clearly, it's electronic records. It's ensuring that the agencies are using the technology in a way that ensures that the records are going to be available 100 years from now so that people can have the same opportunity to hold the government accountable, and learn about the history of the country through their records.

So it's ensuring that they're being created in the appropriate way and preserved, taken care of, and transferred to the National Archives at the appropriate time. So just to give you an example, this is, you know, a huge, complex issue. It's just one little piece of it. Those records schedules that I talked about earlier specify how many years the records are kept in the Agency. And for some agencies, it's 20 or 30 years that the records stay within the agency and that works in a paper environment. It doesn't work in an electronic environment. It makes me really nervous to think about 30 year's worth of electronic records setting, you know, outside of the National Archives. Changes in technology, just the ability to read those over time are a huge challenge.

So we have created something called the Electronic Records Archive within the National Archives which is the facility that ingests that 2-3 percent of the electronic records at the appropriate time. We're incredibly fortunate to have the attention of this administration around records management. The president, in November, issued a memorandum on records management which authorized me and the director of OMB to issue a directive to the agencies spelling out a certain set of requirements for each agency, especially around electronic records so it's the first time since the Truman Administration that presidency and administration has gotten involved in records management so it's really an exciting time for us, and I'm confident that we're going to nail this one.

Paul Kayatta: When discussing your role earlier, you alluded to some unanticipated or unexpected surprises. Since you've begun leading the organization, what's been the biggest surprise that you've faced?

David Ferriero: Well, there are pleasant surprises, and then there are unpleasant surprises. Let me start with the pleasant ones. It's an extraordinary range of materials that we're responsible for, and I am daily surprised, shocked, in awe of what I see. You know from history that things happen. You don't associate documentation that proves that it actually happened. So you know we bought Alaska for $7 million dollars, but do you know there's actually a check drawn on the Riggs Bank for $7.2 million made out to the Russians? And you flip it over and then there's the Russian endorsement and a wonderful letter from Annie Oakley to William McKinley offering to raise a troop of 50 sharpshooter women who will supply their own rifles and ammunition to fight the Spanish-American War, you know, things like that surprises on a daily basis.

For me, coming in, some of the surprises had to do with -- there's a robust CIO, chief information officer, community within the federal government and a robust records management community within the federal government, but these two groups have never worked together so sitting down at that point with Vivek Kundra and the White House and talking about ways that we can ensure that as agencies are creating new information systems, that the records managers are involved to think about the records and implications of those new systems. So the collaboration across agencies, within agencies and then across agencies, is something that we're working on. It was a surprise that wasn't already in place.

I guess in terms of the technology itself, it is very much the way universities were at one point in time where every faculty, every department, was able to go off and build their own system without any coordination across campus. And it's every much what was the situation when I arrived across federal government that every agency had the authority to go off and build their own systems and interoperability, the ability to exchange information, or more importantly, to make the best use of resources in terms of working together to build systems that were not in place when I arrived.

Michael Keegan: Okay, David. I'd like to learn a little bit more about yourself. Could you tell us about your career? I believe you are one of the first librarians to actually --

David Ferriero: I am the first librarian.

Michael Keegan: -- The first, yes. And so could you tell us a little bit about that?

David Ferriero: Sure. I grew up in the libraries at MIT. I started shelving books in the humanities library there in 1965. I was a Northeastern University student. It was a co-op job. I was an education major at that point, and my co-op advisor thought that shelving books in the library was pretty close to education. So I fought with her for several months because I didn't think that was going to be much fun. Finally, she won and I took the job. And, you know, if I hadn't taken that job, I would not be sitting here talking to you today. My co-op advisor is still alive, and I've talked to her and thanked her for making sure that I took her advice.

So I started at MIT in, you know, a very basic kind of situation, and the folks at MIT recognized the fact that they had someone who was curious and went out of their way to ensure that I had opportunities to grow. And the reason I spent 31 years there is, you know, a testament to that.

I dropped out. I hated the education program that I was in. I dropped out and joined the Navy and spent four years in the Navy and was a hospital corpsman. I spent a year in Vietnam. I came back. I had my head on straight and changed majors and went back to MIT part-time while I was finishing my degree. And I thought library school was something that I wanted to do so I did the formal program and stayed, as I said, at MIT. I left there as acting director of libraries in 1996 and went to Duke University where I was the university librarian and spent eight years at Duke. It was a fantastic experience. The president of Duke saw the librarian very much as part of her senior administrative staff so I got to be involved in lots of things that other university librarians don't get to participate in, like curriculum reform and campus master planning and creating a new academic technology empire within the university, so things like that. It was a great experience.

Michael Keegan: So, David, given your experience, what are some of the characteristics of an effective leader?

David Ferriero: I am the third of four children. Birth order really makes a difference. I spent my childhood, you know, bridging the younger and older siblings trying to get people to work together, a skill that to this day is very important in terms of communication. That Navy career involved training as a psychiatric technician so I worked with crazy people in the Navy and got terrific training, training which I use every day in terms of the listening skills, the empathy, paraphrasing, all those kinds of things that is communication across lines.

I have a talent for identifying talent within organizations. In all of my transitions, my first six months is getting to know the staff and identifying talent, rather than bringing people with me. It's focused on my staff. I've spent a lot of attention on the needs of the staff and listening to the staff and valuing history, valuing the history of an organization.

I spent 31 years at MIT, and one of the things that scared me the most about moving to Duke was how would I ever have developed the same level of knowledge about where we came from, you know, our history, in a new environment, but that's something that has always been important to me. I've spent a lot of time talking to former employees, people who have been around for a long time, just to get a sense of where we have come from in order to move forward and to take the best of those lessons from the past and celebrate them and move them forward into planning for the future.

Michael Keegan: How is the National Archives and Records Administration transforming the way it does business? We will ask David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, when our conversation continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm Michael Keegan, your host, and our guest today is David Ferriero, archivist of the United States and head of the National Archives and Records Administration. Also joining our conversation from IBM is Paul Kayatta.

So, David, you had mentioned in our previous segment that you are the nation's record keeper of sorts, and you actually safeguard the records of all three branches of the federal government, and this mandate is unique. I'd like to explore your strategic vision that you've outlined to accomplish your mission. Would you tell us more about your strategic vision for the organization you lead, and briefly highlight some of the key or the six goals that you have?

David Ferriero: So the biggest challenge, as I said, has to do with our transition from paper to electronic records and the ability for us to ensure that we continue to provide the same level of service in an electronic environment that we have in paper. And our mandate is to collect, protect, and encourage the use of the records of the government so that people have the opportunity to primarily hold the government accountable, to learn from our past as we make decisions about the future. So that's broadly what the mission is.

And the strategy, in terms of doing that, has to do with thinking about -- and we're going through this process right now get as a result of the new records management directive -- rethinking the concept of record, exactly what is a record, what needs to be preserved, how it is preserved, and ensuring, as I've said, that it's going to be available in 100 years and more. And each one of those aspects has as a separate set of strategies involved. The preservation piece of it, for instance, is huge just because we barely understand preservation around paper, and that's something that has -- we think we've got that nailed.

Preserving electronic information is much more complicated. We've been experimenting with our early electronic records. There are lots of formats, obsolete formats that need to be preserved. We have a tremendous number of NASA records in an old IBM programming system, EBCDIC language, EBCDIC. No one uses EBCDIC anymore. It’s the ability to translate those into digits that can be migrated over time so we have a long list of things like that. Just think of the word processing systems that have disappeared. All of the e-mail that I talked about earlier, you know, from back to the Reagan Administration, the attachments to those need preservation attention. So the electronic records system has created -- working on this preservation system which identifies as the records are coming into -- being ingested, identifies the attachments and recognizes what needs to be translated.

This is an international effort. This is not just the National Archives. This is -- every national archives is dealing with this kind of problem of ensuring that electronic information is going to be around forever. So identifying, in terms of strategies, identifying logical partners to be working with internally and externally, and this is something that's new to the National Archives. It's identifying best practices within the government, within industry, within universities, to help us solve this problem. Very much -- one of the things that attracted me to this position was this administration's open government directive. The president, on his very first day in office in a meeting with his senior staff, made it clear and said that the government does not have all the answers. We need to find ways of engaging the American public in solving our problems. And I have really taken that to heart in terms of ensuring that as we're creating this electronic future, we are engaging those people in government, outside the government, who have the expertise in order to help us. That's new.

Paul Kayatta: So you've discussed the principles that basically ground your records management approach and the involvement and interest of the president to participate in that. Along those lines, there is a presidential memorandum managing government records. To what end or to what extent are proper records management the backbone of open government, and how does this records management directive carry the requirements forging a 21st Century framework for managing records of the future?

David Ferriero: First of all, I want to point out that backbone of open government is my words in the president's memorandum. That was huge. That's the reason we were able to capture the administration's attention because my argument is if you're serious about open government that means the only way that you're going to have an open government is if you have good records. And since the records process regulations are old, paper-based, it's important for us then to have the authority to move forward and basically revamp the entire record system, and that's what the memorandum did, authorized the creation of the directive which spells out a set of requirements for every agency to work towards a unified electronic records future.

The very first thing it does is to require every agency to identify a senior officer responsible for records. So what it does is to bump up the importance within an agency of records management. The situation in lots of agencies is that it is not a full-time job. It's assigned to the most junior person in an agency, not very well-trained, high turnover, so it doesn't have a lot a priority. So the very first thing is to get a senior officer responsible for records, and I convened the first meeting of those senior officers in December and we, you know, kind of outlined the set of responsibilities that we need to chip through as we create this new electronic records environment.

So there's a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done in terms of redefining the processes, looking at record retention schedules, identifying legislation that needs to be created or changed in order to accommodate the new technologies as we move ahead, but the fact that we've gotten the administration and the OMB on board gives me great hope.

Michael Keegan: So, David, I'd like to transition to the transformation effort that you're leading. I believe you said you've been in the position of archivist for three years. And when you started, you started the transformation effort. Could you tell us a little bit more about the goals of this effort, where you are now, and what lessons you've learned?

David Ferriero: I inherited an agency, you know, as I said, we're 44 facilities spread out across the country, and the Agency was basically organized around geography so that there was a fair amount of repetitive operation or stove piping across the Agency so we went through this planning exercise, this transformation process. We went through a reorganization around business lines, as opposed to geography to make better use of our resources so consolidating all of our education activities. A huge part of our mission is educating the American public, especially the K-12 community, around the role of government using the records to do that. And we have educators across the country before not communicating, not working together, so not a consistent approach to education.

So education, exhibition, it's the same kind of issue, records managers, so a different organization around function.

At the same time, it's creating new units of opportunities to support the work that's going on. We've just created a new center for innovation that is going to -- in October, we had launched this new office which is an opportunity for the staff to work on specific ideas that they have about improving the quality of services or processes, opportunity in our innovation hub that we're creating opportunity for people from the outside to come in and work with us for six months on research projects, things that will improve access to government information, people from other agencies. So it's a new opportunity for the staff to be more involved in the work that they're doing, and that's, I think, the biggest thing in the transformation is opportunities for the staff to get more involved.

Paul Kayatta: So making records available, accessible, discoverable on-line is critical for NARA. In fact, I think I've seen that NARA intends to make as many as twelve billion pieces of paper available to the world. To make that happen requires a very comprehensive digitization strategy. Could you tell us a little bit about that, and how it fits in with previous strategies, and which occurring and changing through the years as you develop this, that potentially you've learned from?

David Ferriero: So when I was at the New York Public Library, I was there for five years, and we were one of the original Google book partners so I was responsible for that project at the New York Public Library. We did about 1 million books with Google so I got my feet wet in terms of mass digitization projects at the New York Public Library. I came here to the National Archives, and we have done a fair amount of digitization work with some commercial partners which is a fairly common way for these large research institutions to get their content digitized.

Our primary focus or our primary partners, have been Ancestry.com, and FamilySearch, those commercial partners who focus on the genealogy community since genealogists and veterans are our two biggest user groups. So those commercial partnerships have been very important for us to get a fair amount of content digitized. We have done some on our own with our own resources. I'm the one who put a state in the ground around the 12 billion pages, and it's based on my own experience and my own reading of the tea leaves. This generation of young users, if it's not on-line it doesn't exist, so instead of fighting that, let's make it happen, so let's be creative about ways to make that happen. So commercial partnerships are certainly something that I will continue to push on and explore. Finding the resources, public/private partnerships to do digitization projects is another source.

User-contributed content, we have a huge number of people who come in to the archives with their own scanners and leave with scanned content so we are now in the process of creating opportunities for those researchers to share their scans with us as a way of building up this corpus of electronic information.

And there's something on the horizon called the Digital Public Library of America which is an initiative, public/private initiative, to create a portal to all the digitized content in the country, and it will come with resources for digitization projects so there's another opportunity there.

Michael Keegan: Well, David, I'm thinking about the transformation efforts, the digitization efforts. I mean, there's a lot of things going on that you're leading, and I was wondering. Are you feeling the pressure like most agencies around cost cutting and cost containment? Have you pursued any of those initiatives?

David Ferriero: Every federal agency is carefully screening all expenditures; making plans for sequestration should that happen. So there are all kinds of exercises that are going on across government, including at the National Archives, to make plans for the what if. So what if the budget of the National Archives gets cut by $30 million? How do we accommodate that? And where does it come from? How do we ensure that we do the work that we need to do in a constrained environment? So it's an opportunity. In my three years, for me it's the first opportunity to really look at how every dollar is spent, all of our contracts, everything.

Michael Keegan: How can the National Archives make records and history more accessible? We will ask David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, when our conversation continues on the The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm Michael Keegan, your host, and our guest today is David Ferriero, archivist of the United States and head of the National Archives and Records Administration. Also joining our conversation from IBM is Paul Kayatta.

David, in the previous segments, you mentioned the electronic records archives. I would like to know a little bit more about it, but particularly, how is it facilitating the preservation and access of electronic government records, and what are you doing to adapt the system to better usability?

David Ferriero: So this is a technology project that I inherited three years ago, a project that had been underway for some time, planning in the late '90s. I actually signed a contract with a contractor in the early 2000s, and so a lot of thinking and development had gone into it. For me, the missing piece and one that I think we are compensating for now is the voice of the user. So this is a system that was built for the agencies, and we didn't get a whole lot of review or participation by the agencies. So we are compensating for that now. I have an advisory committee made up of folks from agencies and university and technology that has been reinvigorated in my three years so we're getting some outside perspective on what we're building. In fact, one of those members of that advisory committee has just been hired on as staff so there's some spillover effect from that level of participation.

So we have built a system that is not the best in the world, but it's getting there because of the fact that we have people testing and advising us, and we're adapting to the new needs. My biggest concern has to do with user access. We're early in the ingestion so all of those records are not available yet for public access, but that's the next frontier to ensure that it's not good enough to ingest. We have to be able to get this stuff out of there so that's the biggest push now.

Paul Kayatta: The use of social media in the United States and the expectation that what you want to find needs to be a social media platform to find it. That's growing exponentially. Would you describe the current media landscape within the U.S. Government what the Archives is doing to work with other agencies in this area?

David Ferriero: You're right. It is the next frontier. The use of social media is huge and growing. Every cabinet-level agency now at least has a FaceBook page, at least one, and a Twitter account, and it's growing exponentially. Since we are responsible for providing guidance, we have provided guidance to the agencies and the White House on the records implication of their use of social media and asked a series of questions about if this is the kind of information that's being shared in these social media platforms, is that record, and how are you planning to capture it. Part of the directive in terms of the work that we're doing as a result of the directive has to do with social media capture. In terms of all the electronic information, this is the new frontier. This is actually the most exciting because it's different. The quality of the content is different than more formal communication. If you're serious about the voice of the people, it’s much more interactive, and it's really exciting to think about 100 years from now for people to be able to see how the American public was engaging with their government in this new way.

Paul Kayatta: So I believe you've been doing some experimentation in this area, such as the citizen archivists and the Citizen Archivist Dashboard initiatives. What else is being done in this area? Can you describe how those initiatives -- help meeting what you're referring to?

David Ferriero: So if the National Archives is responsible for guiding the agencies and the White House on their uses of social media that means it's kind of a no-brainer. That means the Archives has to be out there in front in terms of its use of those social media platforms in order to understand how they are being used. So I have encouraged my staff to every possible social media platform, get out there and experiment, learn from your own experiences. So me personally, you know, I'm on FaceBook and Twitter. I have a blog so I'm out there myself.

The Citizen Dashboard initiative is something I'm very proud of. In fact, we just won the administrative conference of the United States, their Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award for the Citizen Archivist Dashboard. It is based on the president's message that we don't have all the answers. This is a way of engaging the American in helping us do our work. This is an interesting factoid. Lots of those 12 billion pages are in cursive. They don't teach cursive in school anymore. I think there are only three states where cursive is still taught, K-12. We have a generation of kids who can't read these records so we are engaging the American public in transcribing records. We've got thousands of records up. You can go on-line and help us transcribe them. We have opportunities for you to tag photographs. We've got, as I said, 40 million photographs. Not all of the people are identified in them so we've got opportunities for people to help us catalog our photo collection. So there are five or six different opportunities for people to engage.

One of the really exciting citizen archivist activities was a crowd sourcing effort around the 1940 census. In April, we released the 1940 census in electronic form, the first one in electronic form. We didn't have the resources to do the name index so unless you knew exactly the location that you were looking for, you couldn't be successful. One hundred sixty thousand volunteers around the country are working state-by-state to create the name index which they did in three months. So that's an example of citizen archivists at work.

Paul Kayatta: Earlier, you described one of the roles that the Archives has as being the stewards of classified information. Declassification performs a service crucial to a democratic society. When data is over 25 years old, you want to make it available to the public as soon as possible. What are some of the key challenges in this area, and how does the National Declassification Center work to address those challenges?

David Ferriero: Let me start with one of the overarching problems which that Information Security Oversight Office deals with that I talked about. There are, in operation now within the federal government, more than 2,500 different classification guides, so it's not as if there's classified means classified across the government. There are 2,500 different kinds of interpretations of that. So that's one of the overriding factors.

So we're now, in this National Declassification Center, which was created by an executive order at the end of 2009, reviewing 361 million pages of classified content going back to World War I. And we have reviewed all 361 pages so we know exactly what we have. And it's not as if this executive order gave the Archivist of the United States the authority to release this material. It gave me the authority to convene equity holders, those who classified them, to review for decision for release. There are two criteria spelled out in the executive order by which it can remain classified, weapons of mass destruction, national security. Those are the only two criteria by which it can remain classified.

That means working with the agencies to review. And there's some very positive work that has been done to identify those records of an age that can quickly be reviewed. Some legislation that was passed in the late 1990s early 2000s requires page-by-page review of a whole category of material which has slowed us down there.

But of the records that have been through complete processing, 61 percent of them have been released to the open shelves so it's progress.

Michael Keegan: So, David, as part of your charge, you need to balance the need for accessing the Archives' holdings and making sure that they're secure. What are you doing to enhance the information security, to protect the integrity of the content and ensure that there are any restrictions on use are properly honored?

David Ferriero: So one of the lessons learned, now that I'm in this long career of working in research institutions with valuable materials, is never trust anyone. It's establishing this balance between access and protection. I've been through, you know, just some horrible situations at the New York Public Library. A person who was a map dealer and very close to us, a member of the family basically, ended up stealing 72 maps from the New York Public Library and others, hundreds of maps from six other institutions. So as I said, never trust anyone.

It's establishing mechanisms that sensitize the staff to paying attention to how material is being used, where it is, and creating formal processes for ensuring that material is not leaving facilities unauthorized. So three years ago when I arrived, I discovered, as I walked out of the building my first night, that no one was checking my bags. Everywhere I've ever worked, my bags were inspected. We inspect users' bags, but we don't inspect staff bags. So it's instituting, you know, just always paying attention to security never assuming that you've got a right. We created a holdings protection team that has oversight now for those kinds of processes. We have within our inspector general's office a wonderful archival recovery team that is surfing eBay, going to trade shows, looking for records that may have left the National Archives.

So vigilance is the watchword on the part of the staff, but also engaging the user community about educating them about paying attention to what the person at the next table is doing. Unfortunately, a large part of the problem is internal. Studies have shown that about 75 percent of theft is among staff so paying attention to those kinds of issues. We had a long-term staff member responsible for our film collection, and it turns out he was actually stealing our film. So those kinds of situations really hurt.

Michael Keegan: So as we close this segment, I wanted to understand how are you folks tackling the storage and space, the physical storage and space issue, and how does technology such as cloud computing fit into that?

David Ferriero: So for the paper records, we, as I said, we're in 44 facilities around the country. And we, I think, have been pretty clever out in Kansas and Illinois by using caves, wonderful limestone caves, which have been converted into storage facilities for records. So as we prepare for this transition to electronic records and the paper declines, the focus now, of course, is on storage for the electronic records, and we are now experimenting with the cloud. The cloud is the answer.

Michael Keegan: How does the National Archives cultivate civic literacy? We will ask David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, when our conversation continues on The Business of Government Hour.

(Intermission)

Welcome back to The Business of Government Hour. I'm Michael Keegan, your host, and our guest today is David Ferriero, archivist of the United States and head of the National Archives and Records Administration. Also joining our conversation from IBM is Paul Kayatta.

So, David, the National Archives plays a unique and important role in promoting civic literacy in the U.S. Would you elaborate on your efforts and specifically, how does the National Historical Publications Records Commission play in this effort?

David Ferriero: So we do have a responsibility around providing access to the records of the country so that, as I said, people can hold the government accountable, but also can learn about how the government works. And we are taking this especially seriously now because civics seems to have disappeared in the curriculum, the K-12 curriculum. So kids aren't growing up with a basic knowledge of how their government works. So it's creating opportunities through our education programs across the country, doing a massive amount of work to create digital opportunities. We have something called Docs Teach that's a digital facility that has thousands of primary sources, records, lessons plans that teachers have created and that we have created and basically developed by a community of teachers to share information about the use of the records in the classroom.

The National Historic Preservation Records Commission is a grant-funding agency within the Archives which supports the work being done in state archives and institution archives around making those records that they have custody of available. And one of the things I'm proudest of is that commission also funds new ways of doing archival work. So we're focused on new techniques, new processes, and the future of archival work through this commission.

Paul Kayatta: So when you started earlier with George Washington and you talked subsequently about the massive proliferation of electronic data, the Archives' requirements have changed dramatically over the years. How do you keep up with a skilled technical work force to be able to keep up with those challenges that you're facing?

David Ferriero: It's interesting because I've dealt with this in all of my life, seeing the introduction of technology first when I was at MIT, and to see how creatively staff has adapted, exploited, and used the technology so these kinds of institutions, archives and research libraries, attract folks who are curious. So this natural experimentation and self-learning and teaching each other is huge and has been throughout my whole career.

But also as the formal education programs where we recruit from, in terms of universities and archival programs and library science programs, a new generation of tech savvy digital natives are now graduating and joining us which, you know, push us with new kinds of expectations around what the workplace experience is going to be like. It's incredibly exciting to work with these kids, these new folks joining the organization, and to learn from them. One of the things when I'm out in the field visiting my facilities, I always take an opportunity to visit the university program in the neighborhood to talk to students about the National Archives and also talk to them about what they're learning, what their expectations are, to get them excited about public service, working for the government, and possibly coming to work with us at the National Archives. There are lots of internship programs that we have across the country, but I'm very, very interested in the next generation of workers.

Michael Keegan: To pick up on that, what advice would you have for that next generation of workers? What advice would you give someone who's thinking about a career of public service?

David Ferriero: So I had grown up, you know, in private institutions meaning the New York Public Library is a -- well, it's a public library. It's a private institution. This is my first time in government service. This is the most extraordinary experience I've ever had. The opportunity to work in an administration in an environment where your work is valued, we have an opportunity to influence not only the agencies that we're working with, but our international partners and the archival community in the United States, it's an extraordinary opportunity.

And just, you know, we've just come off of a weekend of extraordinary activities here in Washington with the inauguration and just being part of all of that is a gift. It's an extraordinary gift.

Michael Keegan: So, David, I want to thank you for your time today, but more importantly, Paul and I would like to thank you for your dedicated service to the country.

David Ferriero: Thank you very much. And please visit us at www.archives.gov and click on AOTUS: Collector in Chief, my blog.

Michael Keegan: This has been The Business of Government Hour featuring a conversation with David Ferriero, archivist of the United States. My co-host from IBM has been Paul Kayatta. Be sure to join us next week for another informative, insightful, and in-depth conversation on improving government effectiveness. For The Business of Government Hour, I'm Michael Keegan, and thanks for joining us.

This has been The Business of Government Hour. Be sure to visit us on the web at businessofgovernment.org. There you can learn more about our programs and get a transcript of today's conversation. Until next week, it's businessofgovernment.org.

Announcer: This has been The Business of Government Hour. Be sure to join us every Saturday at 9:00 a.m., and visit us on the Web at businessofgovernment.org.

There, you can learn more about our programs, and get a transcript of today's conversation.

Until next week, it's businessofgovernment.org.