Your article was doing great at describing the ineptness of the project management for this project ...

And then you threw in your last line and changed the whole character of your post. Kinda like Rowlings, AFTER her wildly successful Harry Potter books made her a gazillionaire, and THEN she decided to tell her millions of fans around the world that Dumbledore was gay. An irrelevant point after the fact but a bomb nonetheless since it changes the context of everything before it.

The project planning for such a data retrieval and archival project would necessarily be complex. And as presidents more through time and our world becomes more electronic, AND the US Congress adds new requirements to save and preserve more and more data, of course the data volumes will grow astronomically from election to election.

And admittedly, it sounds like the prime contractor and the governing agency made some incredibly bad decisions and waited far too long to make them.

But, a simple search engine check can show you many many instances of the half a dozen presidents even I have seen in my own lifetime who have misdirected information about their presidency. NO president has had a flawless career in the White House. So by throwing the last line into your otherwise insightful and appropriate post to this site's readers, you changed its context into a political statement ... and missed your mark.

[And ironically, my "Are you a person?" question for this reply post is .... "America ready" ! :-) How apropos!]

Interesting point, but certainly not a unique position held by just this President. While I've only seen a few Presidents, I seem to recall that at least all the ones I can recall had some kind of secrecy issue during their term - lost data, internal spying, blocking Congressional investigations, missing media records, etc.

The bigger issue, and the one I would want to know more about is why did it take so long for the governing agency to take the contractor to carpet, why has it taken so long to turn it around, and worse, why are the US tax payers STILL paying for the project??

Both of you (Anonymous and Mark) make great points. I shouldn't downplay the complexity of the project. In fact the GAO addresses that, even as it takes NARA to task, listing the many different data types a presidential (and national) archive might contain:

"Besides the sheer volume, other factors contributing to the challenge of electronic records include their complexity and their dependence on [particular] software and hardware...text documents, e-mails, Web pages, digital images, videotapes, maps, spreadsheets, presentations, audio files, charts drawings, databases, satellite imagery, geographic information systems...They may be complext digital objects that contain embedded images (still and moving), drawings, sounds, hyperlinks or spreadsheets with computational formulas..."

GAO goes on even after that, noting that now dynamic Web pages are common that create data on the fly from databases and exist only in that moment. I wonder, how do we archive those? Should we? Who decides?

Archiving is rarely easy. And it gets so many companies into trouble, regardless of intentions. I think of the investment banks, for example, that faced employee lawsuits in the last few years and were unable to produc just e-mail for the courts.

About my dinging the Bush White House for e-mail problems -- well, it's just a recent example and not to say that other administrations, Republican and Democrat, didn't lose data. Anyone ever find those missing minutes from the Nixon tapes?

I meant to mention that this is not the first time the GAO warned of trouble with NARA's ERA project. Pertinent reports date back to 2002.

--kim

The missing e-mail story has been widely reported as one of secrecy; this is an interesting take on it, from an electronic records management perspective. However, I would like to point out a factual error: your characterization implies that the presidential libraries are distinct from NARA, and are not the official repositories of presidential records. Presidential libraries from Hoover through Clinton are federal institutions operated by NARA. The libraries do not get "copies of some material." All presidential records - and many other kinds of records, along with gifts, artifacts, etc. - for these presidents have been deposited in their respective library. From President Reagan on, the Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires this (Presidents Hoover through Carter donated their records and other papers to their libraries).