by:  Evan Koblentz

Law Technology News

October 24, 2011

It’s a different scale of records management: Electronic Records Archives, the U.S. government’s content management system with public accessibility, is on track to be used by 190 federal agencies by the end of 2012.

Large law firms and corporation counsel may possess huge document repositories, but they don’t compare to the federal system. “Today ERA is storing a collection of electronic records so vast that it can be hard to comprehend,” totalling more than 103 terabytes and constantly growing, said David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, at the ARMA conference this week in National Harbor, Md.

“Less than two decades ago we were storing less than 2,000 electronic data files,” but now the 2010 national census alone is 300 TB, Ferriero noted.

ERA, as of Sept. 30, concluded its development phase, and now IBM will supply maintenance, Ferriero said. “ERA will evolve as records change and new technology options become available to us,” he said. There will be a separate section of ERA for storing classified documents, Chief Records Officer Paul Wester added.

In addition, ERA will have an element that private businesses can emulate—the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, which is a way for end users to contribute, tag, and describe documents. Details will be announced Nov. 4, Ferriero wrote on his blog.

Meanwhile, a variety of software companies announced new products at the conference, designed to help with similar challenges on a corporate scale. Hewlett-Packard’s Autonomy subsidiary released Policy Authority, which consolidates record-keeping and access policies across content repositories. Another company well-known in the legal field, StoredIQ, introduced its RecordsIQ module—the software “provides in-place analysis and classification of data without requiring knowledge worker involvement,” company officials stated. Still another company, OpenText, upgraded its Social Communities framework to include customizable applications and integration with mainstream social networking sites.

Yet all three software firms were overshadowed by Microsoft’s elaboration of its SharePoint-based content management plans in conjunction with IronMountain and GimmalSoft—and that news itself became overshadowed the next day by Oracle acquiring Endeca Technologies in response to the HP-Autonomy deal. Information technology giant IBM, for its part, is likely to have information governance news next week at its Information OnDemand 2011 conference in Las Vegas.

Other announcements for dealing with the data deluge came from DocFinity, which added a records management module to its wider content/process-management system; Laserfiche, which introduced an Apple iPhone interface; and RSD, which upgraded its system to support documents from Iron Mountain and Microsoft SharePoint.

This article originally appeared in Law Technology News.