For three years, the US National Archives and RecordsAdministration have been polling US agencies to assess the records management programs in the federal government.
The 2011 report is available here: http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/resources/self-assessment-2011.pdf
The key findings were:
- most agencies do not have adequate controls for major activities of their records management programs;
- many records management staff have insufficient knowledge and understanding of electronic records, which leads to the continued implementation of poor recordkeeping practices;
- The majority of respondents provided materials that did not support their responses to one or more questions in the self-assessment; and
- nearly a quarter of the respondent agencies do not conduct records management training for their senior officials.
Based on the responses to the 86 questions, the agencies were grouped into ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’ risk.
Andrew
