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Government Wrestles With Social Media Records Retention Policies: Page 2 of 3

She mentioned a new Web site designed around the White House's open government initiative, which asks the public to contribute ideas that will eventually lead to a new policy on openness, including a category on records management. She also said that the National Archives and Records Administration was heavily involved in crafting Obama's transparency policy.

However, in other areas, audience response made it clear that some White House policies may be at odds with where some archivists stand today. Noveck admitted that though cloud computing is a top initiative of federal CIO Vivek Kundra, there are plenty of kinks to work out, especially in terms of records management issues like privacy and security. "It's a very big issue for government in terms of someone else to have control of our stuff," she said to guffaws and whispers of "You think?" from the audience.

Noveck also said that as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper, especially with the advent of cloud computing, worry about when and how to delete government records becomes less important, and she urged more work on data standardization and the use of data standards to avoid costly storage system upgrades as old data formats become obsolete.

After her speech, one conference attendee asked how government agencies should turn dynamic data into records. She said that tools that generate or allow dynamic data to be created -- such as wikis -- should be required to have automatic versioning.

Plenty of guidance on how to keep electronic records already exists, including new social media records. "We have the guidance and awareness, but then we have to figure out how to execute," Wester said. For example, there's guidance for crawling and harvesting Web sites, using PDF capture, making sure to use specific data formats like HTML or XML, a document released almost three years ago called "Implications of Recent Web Technologies for Records" that covers tools like wikis and RSS, and an online Toolkit for Managing Electronic Records.