NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
               ELECTRONIC RECORDS ARCHIVES
             CONTRACT AWARD PRESS CONFERENCE

                     AUGUST 3, 2004
                       10:01 a.m.
                    Washington, D.C.

                  P R O C E E D I N G S

MR. CAHOON:  Good morning.  Is this familiar to any of you?  Or how about this?

This was my user interface to the computer when I learned to program.

Just as these technologies have become obsolete and information on them inaccessible, so too will the information on my thumb drive or my zip drive or my DVD or my CD, in a few years, in just a few years.  So for all of us as individuals, as governments at the state and local level, as private      businesses in this country and around the world, each of us should recognize that much of the information of the late 20th Century and 21st Century will be lost if we don't do something about solving the problems of saving      electronic information over time.
     
Good morning.  I am Reynolds Cahoon.  I am the Assistant Archivist for Human Resources and Information Services and Chief Information Officer of the National Archives and Records Administration.  On behalf of Archivist John Carlin, Archivist of the United States, I welcome each of you with this important announcement about the future of our nation's electronic information and about the archives of the future that will preserve and provide access to it.

I am pleased to welcome members of the administration, Congressional staff, as well as executives representing our partners and information technology leaders from across the country.  I thank each of you for joining us.

Today we will announce award of contracts for the design of the Electronic Records Archives, or ERA for short.

ERA is the archives of the future.  

It will not look like the building that we stand in today but, instead, will be an electronic capability that will authentically preserve any type of electronic record created by any Government agency and will provide access to this information any time, any place and to anyone who has interest or a legal right to access it.

The award we announce today will result in systems analysis and design for ERA, the blueprint from which the physical construction of the archives of the future can begin.

Dr. Ken Thibodeau, who is the program director, will speak more about our plans in just a moment but, before he does, I would like to explain a bit about the electronic records challenge our nation, rather, our entire digital world faces.

The National Archives and Records Administration is responsible for records management in our Government, government-wide.  At one time this meant paper records and now our Government operates primarily on records created digitally.  However, we do not currently have the tools or the systems      necessary to preserve electronic records and to provide access to them over time.  This      problem affects every one of us.  Let me give you just a few examples of what I mean.

Without access to usable electronic records, young Americans serving in       Iraq today may not be able to get their veterans benefits or access to their digital health records.  Without access to usable electronic records citizens might not be able to document their entitlements, such as Social Security benefits. 

The safety and efficacy of our nuclear stockpile depends upon access to complex, critical, usable electronic records.  And much of the information that is used to secure our borders and our citizens is digital and will be needed long after the computers that created them are obsolete.  

Access to vital electronic records will be critical in times of disruption or emergency to provide much needed Government services.  Preservation and access to electronic records is at the heart of continuity of Government and our nation's critical infrastructure. Let me briefly describe some of the factors that make electronic records such a challenge. 

The authenticity factor.

Trustworthy records are at the heart of our democracy.  Electronic materials are by their very nature, vulnerable to loss and to change.  Ensuring authenticity and security in a digital world is at the center of the mission of the National Archives.  

There is the obsolescence factor.

The technology that creates electronic records is constantly improving and, at the same time, is constantly becoming obsolete.  This may be the most difficult and most devilish factor in managing electronic records, if this information is to be available when it is needed over time.

There is the complexity and the variety factor. 

There are over 16,000 formats of information that we know of today that need to be stored and managed.  Electronic records are increasingly sophisticated, from simple email and text documents to complex aircraft designs, to high energy physics simulations.     The complexity factor is a significant force in managing electronic records.  

Finally, there is the volume factor. There are billions of electronic     records created by the Federal Government. Examples of those records include over a billion digital images of official military personnel records.  Six-hundred to eight-hundred million census images that document our population at the turn of the century.  

The Electronic Records Archives program you will hear about this morning is focused on dealing in a comprehensive way with all of these vexing and interconnected challenges.  The truth is that vital digital      materials are being lost every day and the cost of those losses is unknown and       unknowable. 

For example, many weapons systems vital to our nation's defense have digital design drawings.  Losing this information to obsolescence could cost millions of dollars and countless hours to replace. 

We do know this.  America runs on digital information and ensuring its accessibility and usability now and over time is the challenge of our generation and we must meet it.

Finally, for me, our ancestors left for us a rich record of themselves and       they worked hard to preserve those records for us.  With ERA we will be able to leave our great, great grandchildren the vital information they deserve about us and what we did with our turn on this planet.  Without ERA our legacy may be a void of records lost forever to our own ever-changing technology. Our descendants deserve more.

I would like now to introduce Dr. Ken Thibodeau, who is the Director of the       ERA program, to explain in more depth our plans for building ERA and our progress so far.  Following Ken's remarks, John Carlin, Archivist of the United States, will announce the contract awards.  

Ken

DR. THIBODEAU:  Good morning.
Thank you, Ren.  Welcome.
  
This is an historic day for the National Archives and Records Administration.                  

Mr. Cahoon emphasized the complexity, the, really, enormity of the problems we face.  I would like to shift perspective a little bit and talk about the   promise the technology offers us. 

Back in 1973 two computer scientists, Vin Cerf and Bob Kahn, started research on the problem of how to get two computers to introduce themselves to one another and then to be able to share data. The result of their collaboration was called the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol or TCP/IP for short. 

Most people if they looked at TCP/IP would see something rather esoteric and judge it to be rather irrelevant, but they would be completely wrong on the last point. TCP/IP enabled the internet, and it is the foundation of a host of developments that have come in its wake including virtually unlimited practical applications and benefits to society.  

Ordinary people would probably find today's announcement -- well, actually, they would probably not find it at all in most cases, but if they did find it they would probably also consider it to be rather esoteric and irrelevant to their lives.  It is our intention to prove them wrong on that count, as well. 

TCP/IP enables people to send data around the world.  The technology behind the Electronic Records Archives will enable us to transmit data over very long periods of time but it will do more than that.  By raising the level from transmitting data to communicating records, it will enable us to reliably transmit information over both space and time and generations of technology, information that is of such quality that Americans can depend on it to protect their rights, to do business, to interact with their Government.                  

Let me give a little more detail on one of the cases Ren Cahoon cited a few       minutes ago.  The personnel files for Americans serving in our armed forces today are in digital formats.  Our military depend on these files not only for their military careers but afterwards to obtain benefits from the Veterans Administration and for other purposes like jobs and insurance.  But no one      today can guarantee to our military forces that these electronic records can be preserved as long as needed. 

The Electronic Records Archives will enable the U.S. Government to honor its commitment to veterans.  It will enable us to maintain the military personnel files intact and authentic. 

The contracts which the Archivist will announce in a few minutes mark a major milestone in the Government's effort to ensure that we can manage, preserve and provide sustained access to electronic records. 

Mr. Carlin started us on the path towards this milestone six years ago in the summer of 1998 when he chartered the Electronic Records Archives project at the time.  Recognizing that in spite of the fact that NARA had been making efforts to deal with electronic records since the mid '60s, in the late '90s none of the technology that we had or that we could find in the marketplace was remotely capable of dealing with the complexity of the challenges we faced.  The Archivist charged us with searching the horizons of computer science to see if there were emerging technologies that offered potential for addressing these challenges. 

To do that we formed an ever expanding set of partnerships with other agencies that shared an interest in long-term retention of digital assets.  In all honesty, we could not have reached where we are today without the collaboration of agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Patent and Trademark Office, the Army Research Lab, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and others, and through them we gained access to world-class knowledge and expertise of institutions like San Diego Supercomputer Center, the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, University of Maryland, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford and others. 

These relationships, these partnerships, have helped us to both identify and evaluate possibilities and to develop the vision for the system that we are contracting for today.
                  
In the course of the next year with both of the contractors, we will be       working very intensely to refine the requirements for the ERA into system       specifications that are precise enough to guide actual design and development.  Each team will take those specifications as the basis for design of the system, which will both support NARA's end-to-end process for lifecycle management of records and to ensure the preservation of valuable electronic records.  NARA will then select one of these teams to proceed with actually developing the       system.

As I said, we will be working intensely but we won't be working in      isolation.  We will work with Federal agencies to prototype collaborative tools for records management. We will work with the military and with the staff of e Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness to ensure that the system we develop satisfies requirements for military personnel records.

  We will work with the Surgeon General of the Army to ensure that digital medical records remain available and useful in medical care for soldiers and veterans.  We will work with the Department of Energy to ensure that important records of our nuclear stockpile are adequately protected and accessible when needed.  And we will reach out to members of the public who are interested in our holdings. Such interactions will give us better insight into the needs and desires of our customers inside of Government and out. Will put us in a better position to evaluate the designs we receive and to select a winning team to develop a system.
                  
Where will all these lead?  In simple terms, it will enable NARA to continue to fulfill its mission in the 21st Century. It will increasingly enable Americans to obtain access to valuable electronic records over the Internet.  And we expect it will spur the development of technologies which other    agencies, other governments and private sector organizations can use to meet their own requirements for managing and preserving electronic records.  Thank you.

It is now my pleasure to introduce the Archivist of the United States, John
      Carlin.

MR. CARLIN:  Good morning.  As many of you know, the National Archives and

Records Administration is our nation's record-keeper.  Every day we work to preserve and provide access to the records of our Government, whether those records are the Declaration of Independence, service records of our military veterans, electronic cable files from the State Department for documentation on homeland security issues that will make our country safer.

Throughout the history of our democracy these records have been firsthand witnesses to the events that have shaped our country.  They have documented the rights and entitlements of our citizens and they have held our Government officials accountable to the people.

Now, just like in the private sector, more and more of our Government       records are created and must be maintained in electronic format and, as Ren and Ken have pointed out, this poses challenges that have never been taken on by a Government agency before.

I am proud that the National Archives has both the mission and the       capabilities to solve the problems posed by electronic records.  At every step of the process of developing the ERA, we have partnered with the best and the brightest to develop solutions.  And today that will continue as we reach this milestone.

In just a minute I am going to announce the winners of the contract to design       the new Electronic Records Archives.  But first I want to stress that this is not just an average Government contract.  These design contracts are valued at approximately $20 million for the first year.  However, this contract is potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the life of the       contract, with countless ramifications for individuals, private businesses and Government organizations alike, as well as our country and the world.  Mark my words.  ERA, or Era, is going to change the world as we know it.
                  
Let me give you an example of how ERA will benefit individuals and streamline       both private and public business processes. Recently the Department of Health and Human Services announced plans for a new nationwide health care information network where individual medical records could be maintained electronically and accessed whenever and wherever needed. 

This would mean that doctors would be able to see a patient's current medical       file and have accurate information on which to base treatment decisions, thus potentially reducing medical errors and costs and improving treatment.  In this way the medical community would be able to, in effect, transcend distance and space, giving a doctor in California access to the treatment information carried out by another doctor in New York.

But in order for this system to really work, we must also transcend time.       Meaning the information in an individual's medical file must be preserved intact over the long term.  In this way the doctor of an elderly patient who is suffering from heart disease will have access to results of that patient's first EKG administered 30 years earlier.  Technology and solutions developed for ERA will make this possible.

You see, when we say that ERA will make electronic information available       virtually any time, anywhere, and to anyone with internet access, we are not just talking about the information contained in Government records.  We will start with Government records but there is no end to where ERA can take us.

It is now my pleasure to announce the winners of the contract to design the new       Electronic Records Archives.  Both of these companies have proven track records in areas that will support electronic records management.  They will hone their       architectural insights and what the completed ERA system should look like and what specific tools should go into it.

The awarding of these contracts follows five years of intensive study by NARA       on the requirements for the design and implementation of the ERA, and we believe that having two companies compete in this first phase will optimize the ERA system design.

NARA evaluated each of the offers we received on how well the company understood       both our mission and the particular challenges we face in the area of electronic records.  We asked them to describe a solution in terms of an overall architecture which addresses all of our requirements and a design which shows that the architecture can be implemented and that it can evolve over time.

We asked them to demonstrate that they have the technical know-how to build a       system and that they have the management capability to do it on time and within budget. We investigated how well they have performed on other contracts and we did an in-depth analysis of their proposed costs.  Based on all of these factors, we have determined the best value was in the proposals from these two       companies.

The first company is Lockheed Martin.  Lockheed Martin is a leader in defense and Government markets.  Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, the corporation employs about 130,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced technology systems, products and services.

I am pleased to introduce Don Antonucci, President of Lockheed Martin's    Transportation and Security Solutions Division.

MR. ANTONUCCI:  John, thank you very much and good morning to everybody.

This is certainly a very significant morning for the National Archives and Records Administration, for Lockheed Martin, and for our past, present and future history.

Let me begin by congratulating the NARA team, both Ken and Ren, their whole team, for bringing such a professional, well-managed, acquisition process.  You served your country well.

We are extremely pleased that our team has been selected to participate in this       program that will be so important to preserving the history and the heritage of the United States.

The Electronic Records Archives Program continues the tradition and      responsibility of governments to record and make available to their citizens those records that reflect the acts and the facts of the Government.

 The first documented archives collection dates back to 78 B.C.  The     Tabularium or Hall of Records housed the state archives as a monument to Rome, including the laws, the edicts and treaties of Rome's magistrates.

Over 2000 years later we can look back on our history of recording government       actions and see the progress of our human journey.  As we have seen throughout history, the manner of recording and documenting the acts and facts of the government has continuously evolved from tablets, to parchment, to film, all the way through today's digital age.  Even as we speak, literally, this web cast presents its own interesting challenges for preserving, in an authentic manner, today's events.

Just as we look back at 2000 years ago, we want to be sure people 2000 years from now have the opportunity to look back on today.  The authentic retention of Government records in this age of electronic records is amazingly complex.

Because of rapidly surging technologies, diversity and volume of records,       it is essential that the ERA system has the flexibility and scalability to help meet NARA's mission.  The challenge is to figure out not only how to manage and preserve electronic records but to preserve them so that they will be accessible decades from now using technology that has not yet been created or even imagined.

But the ERA program is not just a technology endeavor.  We see this program as       having a transformational effect on how NARA does business, a combination of business process and technology to support your mission.

Our team, already committed and working together for well over a year to       support your goals and the objectives of meeting this large scale system integration challenge.  We built a team that includes the expertise and experience needed to address the complex and varied requirements of such a       program.

The entire Lockheed Martin team looks forward to working closely with the ERA       program over the next year to refine and achieve the consensus on the physical       architecture, to drive down program risk and program cost, and to bring a functional Electronic Records Archives to fruition.

The ERA mission is critical.  We stand ready and committed to support and       achieve your goals and objectives.  We look forward to helping you build a nationwide digital archives that sets the standards for authenticity, persistence and service.

Thank you for this honor.  We look forward to sharing in your future success.

MR. CARLIN:  The second company is Harris Corporation.  

Harris Corporation is an international communications equipment company   focused on providing product, system and service solutions for commercial and       Government customers.  The company serves markets for microwave broadcast, secure tactical radio and government communication systems.

Harris has more than 10,000 employees including 5,000 engineers and       scientists and is headquartered in Melbourne, Florida.  It is my pleasure to introduce Bob Henry, Senior Vice President of Harris Corporation and President of its Government Communications System Division.

MR. HENRY:  Thank you, John, for your gracious comments today.

I stand before you today just overwhelmed to be a part of history.  This is       extremely exciting and, on behalf of the Harris team, I would like to thank Ren and Ken and the ERA Source Selection Board for not only selecting the Harris team but also for their collective vision and leadership throughout the ERA bid process.  We are ecstatic to be selected as one of the teams to go forward.

ERA is a very important program for America and for the Harris team, since       we'll be continuing contributing to NARA's efforts to preserve our nation's history.  The importance of the ERA program is evident in the level of effort and commitment displayed by the NARA team.

To the Harris team the ERA program addresses the unique challenge of accepting,       understanding and preserving the mass influx of electronic record data.

Partnership is critical in today's competitive world.  Partnership between the       government and the contractor teams is essential.  Let me introduce the contractor side of the Harris partnership team.  And I will ask each of these individuals to stand, please.

First, from Booz, Allen, Hamilton I would like to introduce Patrick Peck, Vice       President.

And from CACI we have Gil Guarino, Executive Vice President.

Both Booz, Allen, Hamilton and CACI are already valued partners of NARA in       key technology and business process.  We feel they are essential to the success of the ERA development.

Rounding out our partnership we have Information Manufacturing Corporation       which has extensive experience in archiving mass amounts of data in many different formats.  Representing IMC is Rob Hytner, CEO.

Thank you, gentlemen.

In addition to the outstanding qualifications of our teammates mentioned       during the introductions here, Harris brings systems integration expertise and high tech capabilities very specific and beneficial to ERA.

In closing let me emphasize that the Harris team is fully committed to making       this phase of the program a success.

John, let me turn it back to you.

Thank you.
                  
MR. CARLIN:  I know I say with total sincerity, on behalf of the entire ERA       team and the National Archives and Records Administration, we look forward to working with both of you in the coming year to make the success we ultimately all want.

Now, I bring this to a close.  All five of us participants, Ren, Ken, Bob and Don and myself, will be available individually to those of you who might like to ask questions.

And I know that the press team has ultimately a press kit for everyone as you exit.  Thank you very much for coming and we look forward, all of us, to an exciting year ahead, don't we?  

Thank you.