National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Challenge

As the "national record keeper" for the United States, the NARA maintains more than 2.5 million cubic feet of paper documents and an extensive library of film, video tape, audio tape, and museum items. The NARA serves the needs of over 280,000 researchers and nearly 1 million museum visitors per year, and maintains 40+ facilities across the U.S., including museums and the 14 Presidential libraries. Increasing numbers of people use the NARA's services and gain access to its records through the Internet. Network performance and reliability problems were hindering the NARA's ability to fulfill its mission. Consequently, the NARA called on DRC for an enterprise-wide approach to managing the NARA networks and IT infrastructure.

Solutions

DRC provides IT project management and technical expertise to the NARA, supporting the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, as well as remote sites in 17 states, including the Presidential libraries and record centers. DRC administers IT networks and systems, provides network security services, conducts software development life cycle oversight, manages the NARA tape library complying with stringent data retention guidelines, and develops and implements web-based applications for records management. DRC developed an automated system to which data from an old, at-risk, batch-mode system could be migrated. This DRC-designed and implemented Master Location Register (MLR) intranet solution enables 150 internal users to manage 4 million containers of archived material.

We also reorganized Help Desk operations, providing HDI-certified staff to centralize and manage daily operation of the NARA enterprise-wide Help Desk at 39 sites throughout the United States.

Benefits/Achievements

Our seamless upgrade of servers, networks, and standard operating procedures has improved archivists' ability to access needed data. For example, we designed and instituted the process for migrating 31 sites to new servers, including Presidential libraries and record centers.
Our high-quality on-site technical support has garnered recognition from staff at several Presidential libraries. For example, our Help Desk support resulted in greatly improved user responsiveness—increasing by 37% the number of closed tickets in year 1 and 34% in year 2.

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