A National Archive and Records Administration official says hardware is procured and development is near completion for a classified electronic records archive that will function as a completely separate, firewalled instance of the now-operational Electronic Records Archive.

The system will not be an exact copy of the ERA and could go live in the next year as NARA works to ensure that relational metadata visible in unclassified databases is unlinked from classified data that would migrate to a classified electronic record archive.

"All of the--for lack of a better word--documentation with those records, in that classified instance will be separate from the system itself," said Paul Wester, chief records officer at NARA, while speaking Oct. 17 at the ARMA conference in Oxon Hill, Md.

"We'll be bringing in records from the intelligence agencies, the military services particularly related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moving those records will be a scale that's comparable to the Census over a period of time," said Wester.

For the newly-deployed ERA, scale is a long-term issue that NARA needs to address. Since November 2010, NARA has moved agency and department documents to the system at a pace of 10 terabytes per quarter. Helping agencies migrate and determining which records should be transferred in order to stay on pace has been a monumental effort, said Wester. Future migration efforts will depend on bringing electronic records in earlier, he added.

"We need to figure out how to manage electronic records in ways that don't require us to move them around physically, because we're still in the physical moving business. We need to figure out how to use different technologies, different policies, the cloud," said Wester.

"We have a new chief information officer, Mike Walsh, who's started to do some thinking about this issue and how we address the pending issue we have with volume," he added.

One emerging solution is for NARA to help agencies better manage their internal records before they are transferred to NARA. The more effectively agencies manage their schedules and categorize their records, the easier it will be to feed the ERA. Eventually NARA would like to work with agencies to better manage their records by linking metadata to a "switch" that would automatically push records to a shared environment, said Wester.

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