David S. Ferriero

“ All over the country, archives are reuniting citizens with their rights and helping historians research and tell the American story. Through the work of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we’ve helped fund documentary histories of Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Martin Luther King, from the records of the Florida everglades to the civic history of Los Angeles. ”

“ It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future. Among democracies, I think through all the recorded history of the world, the building of permanent institutions like libraries and museums for the use of all the people flourishes. ”

“ The backbone of the Administration’s Open Government initiative is effective records management. There is a disconnect between those responsible for agency records and the information technology folks in those same agencies. The CIO Council, composed of the CIOs of all the agencies, need to work together to develop the IT tools necessary to manage electronic records in a cost effective way. ”

“ If the past teaches us anything, it is that challenges persist. A century ago, J. Franklin Jameson and the American Historical Association were crying out for the establishment of a National Archives, for we were losing our national memory. ”

“ Certainly if you look at the national network of archives—the records at the federal, state, local and academic levels—you would count well into the billions. Electronic records are only going to blow the top off. ”

“ But we need the best minds at colleges and universities and the private sector working in concert to develop new ways of not simply saving the records, but preserving them and figuring out ways to make sure they are accessible. ”

“ Publish Government Information Online — particularly high-value data and through an open gateway for agency activities. 2. Improve the Quality of Government Information 3. Create and Institutionalize a Culture of Open Government 4. Create an Enabling Policy Framework for Open Government We are working through the mechanisms at the National Archives to embrace these goals and principles, and we will release a first draft of our plan on April 7. At the heart of the plan is a flagship initiative to develop web and data services that are worthy of the American people. ”

“ According to the Report of the Committee on the Records of Government, a bipartisan federal committee working with the scholars, "The United States is in danger of losing its memory." The federal government and state and local governments have huge quantities of paper records at risk. ”

“ This is an inter-agency effort, led by the Archives, to streamline declassification processes, facilitate quality assurance, and provide training for declassification reviewers.
Ultimately, the Center will usher in a new day in the world of access, allowing us to make more records available for public scrutiny much more quickly. To give you a sense of the task ahead, there are now some 2,000 different security classification guides at work in the government and more than 400 million pages of records awaiting declassification and public access by December 31, 2013. ”

“ And that is especially true in our own land, because we believe that people ought to work out for themselves, and through their own study, the determination of their best interest rather than accept such so-called information as may be handed out to them by certain types of self-constituted leaders who decide what is best for them". ”

“ A 2008 survey by CREW, in fact, could not find a single federal agency policy that mandates an electronic record keeping system agency-wide, rather a "print and file" system is pervasive. A system that is highly selective and serves as a serious memory loss vehicle. ”