Electronic Records Archives

[5] According to Kenneth Thibodeau when he was the ERA program's director, the idea of an initiative to better manage electronic records took shape in the 1990s as NARA officials looked ahead to the expected end of the Bill Clinton administration in January 2001, when the White House would hand over staff email messages for preservation: "We estimated the transfer of something in the realm of forty million e-mail messages.

Even if we expanded existing systems a hundredfold, we still could not handle the simple workload of copying those files.

[1] A $308 million, six-year contract to build the system was awarded to Lockheed Martin in September 2005.

[5] Development of the system ended in 2011[8] and within a few years it was storing hundreds of terabytes of electronic records.

[3] Among other things, the project would incorporate cloud computing technology and an Agile software approach.