Gateways to the Past, Present, and Future: Practical Guidelines for Electronic Records Access Programs

Summary

Project started on Jan. 10, 2000 (Completed)

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While the primary use of records in government is to support and document specific business processes, responsible records managers must also ensure that these records are available for other important uses.

The growing demand for records to be available in electronic form and for direct access to these electronic records is changing the design and management of records access programs.

New technologies such as the Internet make it easy to share information, while data warehousing and data mining can help translate traditional historical analysis into a strategically useful day-to-day planning tool.

CTG and the New York State Archives and Records Administration partnered with National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to develop a set of practical guidelines to support and promote secondary uses of electronic records. Through a combination of best practices and project-based research, the project addressed recordkeeping requirements in the context of the broad spectrum of historical and other secondary uses.

The project produced a guidebook called Opening Gateways: A Practical Guide for Designing Electronic Records Access Programs.

Scope of Work

While the primary use of records in government is to support and document specific business processes, responsible records managers must also ensure that these records are available for other important uses: to support business processes in other agencies; to give the public access to needed information; to support the scientific analyses that are used to evaluate programs, inform policy-making, or plan facilities; and, finally, to serve as a legal and historical record of government decisions and operations. 

Many people and organizations need government information: the researcher trying to understand trends in education, the local charity documenting the need for senior housing, an engineering firm preparing an environmental impact statement, a sixth-grader writing a term paper about the history of her town.

For example, information collected when issuing a birth or death certificate can have secondary uses for medical, genealogical, or demographic research. Data collected for police work can be useful in studying crime trends and meteorological data can be helpful in researching global climate changes. Increasingly, this information is being requested in an electronic format.

Many different kinds of organizations provide access to government information - libraries, government archives, and all kinds of public agencies at every level of government. Universities and nonprofit organizations may also be repositories of government information. They, too, are making the transition to a largely electronic way of working.

The growing demand for information to be available in electronic form and for direct access to these electronic records is changing the design and management of records access programs. Programs are shifting from staff-supported access models to direct user access models, now made possible over the Web. Making a successful transition to this increasingly electronic model requires careful assessment of the users, uses, content, operation, and cost of a desired program. This shift often requires program managers (content experts) to join traditional information access professionals in a new way of working.

The Center for Technology in Government and the New York State Archives and Records Administration will continue to expand their existing partnership with NHPRC to develop a set of practical guidelines to support and promote secondary uses of electronic records. Through a combination of best practices and project-based research, the proposed project will address recordkeeping requirements in the context of the broad spectrum of historical and other secondary uses. The project is designed to produce robust records management processes and models to ensure that the data maintained by government agencies will be available and useable for the widest variety of contemporary and future public needs.

The proposed project will address critical electronic records research issues. It will explore methods for ensuring long-term access to electronic records of outstanding social, cultural, and informational value for secondary research. It will investigate the use of innovative and emerging technologies for accomplishing this goal. The project will directly address the cost and benefits of preserving and making available electronic records of social and cultural significance.

The project will also explore the use of innovative resource-sharing approaches and emerging technologies to reduce the cost of preservation, access, and use. Most importantly, this project will conduct applied research that will yield practical tools with wide applicability across both public and private sector organizations. It will involve a critical partnership between records creators, a leading archival institution, and an award winning research institute known for applying academic knowledge to practical problems and generating implementable solutions.

Press Releases & News Stories

Press Releases

Publications & Results

Guide

Report

Journal Article

Partners

Government Partners

Corporate Partners

  • AlbanyNet, Inc. now known as VeraNet Solutions

Center for Technology in Government

  • David Connelly, Graduate Assistant
  • Meghan Cook, Project Management Specialist
  • Sharon Dawes, Director
  • Kristine Kelly, Research Associate
  • Theresa Pardo, Project Director

The Gateways Advisory Committee will provide advice, information, and recommendations to the NYS Center for Technology in Government (CTG), and the New York State Archives on the activities and results of the project. The committee will be asked to provide feedback on the relevance of the issues and the design of the products and usefulness of the project results.

  • Tora Bikson, Rand Corporation
  • Lisa Brzezicki, MasterCard International
  • Philip B. Eppard, Information Science and Policy, University at Albany
  • Richard Farrell, University at Albany
  • Paul Fisk, NYS Division of the Budget
  • David Goodall, NYS Department of Motor Vehicles
  • Steven Gorrie, State Farm Insurance Companies
  • Eleanor Gossen, University at Albany
  • Peter Hirtle, Cornell Institute for Digital Collections
  • Robert Hord, Xerox Corporation
  • Norman J. Jacknis, Westchester County
  • Lloyd Lininger, School of Public Health, University at Albany
  • Terrence Maxwell, NYS Forum for Information Resource Management
  • Charles McClure, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
  • George Musa, NYS Psychiatric Institute
  • Will Pelgrin, NYS Office for Technology
  • Lisa Radcliffe, HELP USA
  • Pamela Rinehart, US Patent & Trademark Office
  • Kenneth Thibodeau, National Archives & Records Administration

Expert Panel

  • Tora Bikson, Rand Corporation
  • Phillip Coombs, Washington State Archives
  • Philip B. Eppard, Information Science and Policy, University at Albany
  • Robert Horton, Minnesota Historical Society
  • Geoffrey Huth, New York State Education Department
  • Alan Kowlowitz, NYS Office for Technology
  • Ekkehard Mochmann, Central Archive for Empirical Social Research
  • Andy Potter, National Archives & Records Administration

Funding Sources

This material is based upon work supported in part by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission under Grant No. 98027.