Many government buildings are collapsing under the weight of the paper they house now. Beyond that, printing and storing such records flies in the face of the movements toward greater citizen access and more efficient agency operations. Governments need to do better, something NARA managers realized even before the Public Citizen case. One federal deputy chief information officer, Alan Balutis of the Commerce Department, called Friedman's ruling managerially impossible to live up to. The heart of the NARA ruling is preservation of not just the words or images in electronic records, but also any associated link, routing, time stamp, authentication or origin data.
Electronic records beg to be maintained in digital form.
Current workflow and document management products aren't yet up to the task. When the original is paper, you can always microfilm it. Moreover, even microfilm isn't really preservation of the paper record. Some experts can take a shred of paper and figure out when it was made and by what paper mill. Aware of the electronic preservation challenge, several vendors and federal agencies are at work on solutions.