Leslie Johnston
Director, Development and Tools Management
National Archives and Records Administration
In 2014 the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) began the process of refactoring its Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system. Development of the system had ended in 2010, and it was time to review the processing and preservation needs of an increasingly diverse collection of archival holdings that exceeded 500 TB in size. The initiative is agile and modular, developing an architecture and applications for a cloud-based system to support transfer, ingest, processing, and preservation functions; discovery for staff use; and export to the public National Archives Catalog. The processing and preservation functions will be a highly modular environment where tools can be easily changed and updated as record formats change, and archivists will work in virtualized workbenches. The implementation is bringing tools to the data in the cloud, developing an agnostic framework for incorporating tools, employing both embedded tools and thick-client tools in a virtual environment, presenting a file system view on the S3 storage environment. ERA 2.0 will upgrade digital preservation functionality extant in the current production system, and enable additional efficiency and automation in the processing of electronic records at scale.