RACO 2009

Good morning everyone. Today is the big day. RACO 2009 is underway and Laurence Brewer is now introducing this blog and the twitter account to all of the attendees. Hello everyone.

One of the highlights of RACO is the presentation of the Archivist Achievement Awards. These awards recognize Federal agencies who have achieved some notable success in their records managenent programs or activities that have significantly benefited the agency as a whole. This year the awards will be presented by the Acting Archivist Adrienne C. Thomas during the luncheon program.

The first awards were presented in 1998. For the first couple of years we called them “Best Practices in Records Management.” The awards that year went to the Bonneville Power Administration headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) here in Washington. Kathy Schultz, then Records Officer for PTO accepted their award. Kathy is now Records Officer for the Department of Homeland Security. Can someone remind me who accepted for Bonneville Power?

Who will be recognized this year? If you can’t be there in person - watch the Twitter feed around noon on Thursday for the live announcement!

Do you want to receive an award next year? Watch for the request for nominations next February.  We send the announcement to our agency points of contact. The nominations are reviewed by three NARA offices: the Life Cycle Management Division - the NARA records management staff who work most closely with the agencies; my office - the Modern Records Programs; the Policy and Planning Staff; and the final selection made by the Archivist of the United States.

We will be looking for your nomination in 2010!

After lunch, RACO 2009 will focus on practical case studies and examples of social media already being used by our colleagues in the Federal government. These sessions will provide both background on policy development and real-world examples of how these collaborative tools are already being used in a variety of ways.

Jeffrey Levy, Director of Web Communications for the Environmental Protection Agency and Lovisa A. Williams, Senior Technology Advisor for Public Diplomacy at the State Department will open the afternoon program. Their panel is entitled Managing Communications without Boundaries: Developing Policy and Guidance on the Use of Social Media Tools.  As Federal agencies start to experiment with these tools, effective policies and guidance are necessary to serve as the foundation for successful efforts. Then, we’ll learn about some of those efforts.

Our first case study will hear from both Jaqi Ross, Communication Advisor at IRS and Chris Rasmussen, Social Software Knowledge Manager for the Intelligence Community. They will discuss how their agencies and partners worked together on Building Collaborative Communities.  The second case study will consist of Erin Edgerton, Senior Social Media Strategist for the CDC along with Dave Govoni, Senior Web Advisor and Scott Horvath, Public Affairs Specialist, both from the US Geological Survey. Their case study is Reaching Out to Customers.  Both sessions promise to be filled with great tips and best practices that they’ve identified while using social media tools.

Again, please feel to leave specific comments and questions for these speakers below.

A week from now, RACO 2009 will be underway. We’ve already highlighted the keynote speaker Beth Noveck. But what can you expect from the rest of our program? Let’s take a more detailed look at the morning sessions.

First on the schedule is the welcome from fellow blogger Laurence Brewer. Laurence will open RACO 2009 and introduce our first speaker, Robin Riat from NARA’s Central Plains Region in Kansas City. Robin’s session is entitled What is Social Media? An Overview of Existing Tools and Technologies. This session will provide background information about the various tools and technologies that are loosely characterized as “web 2.0″ and demonstrate how these tools are used.  It is great way to introduce the theme of RACO 2009, Collaborating Across Boundaries: Goverment Records and Social Media.

Next on the program is the keynote address from Beth Noveck. After the keynote, I will take the stage along with my colleagues Jason Baron from NARA’s Office of General Counsel and Susan Sullivan from our Office of Modern Records Programs . This session is Records Management Implications of Implementing Social Media Tools. We will be discussing the records management challenges that agencies face when dealing with social media. We will highlight NARA’s exiting guidance as well as the Toolkit for Managing Electronic Records and talk about how these can be used to address those challenges.

Please feel free to leave any comments and questions that you may have below. We’ll pass them along to the speakers.

We are very excited to have Beth Noveck as the keynote speaker at RACO 2009, our 21st annual Federal records administrators’ conference at the Reagan Building on Thursday, May 28th.

To get a flavor of her presentation, see below:

Beth is currently on leave from New York Law School to help lead President Obama’s openness and tranparency efforts from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).

To learn more about Beth see her pre-government bio and check out some of her innovative work citizen participation and openness here including the peer-to-patent initiative done in cooperation with the U.S. Patent Trademark Office.

We’ve all seen the YouTube videos of the President’s weekly address. But you should go to the OSTP blog to see an early example of what Beth and others in OSTP’s Open Government Initiative are developing to increase transparency, openness, and citizen participation.

Of course, our challenge - as Federal records and information managers - is to figure out how to manage the Federal records emerging from these collaborative environments to meet agency business needs, protect rights and assure accountability, and ensure records of archival value are preserved and made available for future generations.

From the archival and records management perspectives, what are the challenges and opportunities you see in this new web 2.0 world? What do you think Beth should address when she is with us on Thursday, May 28th at 9:00 am?

We look forward to hearing from you. Leave us a comment below.

Welcome! This is the National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) blog to discuss all things RACO. This year’s Washington, DC area RACO is going to be held on May 28, 2009 at the Ronald Reagan Building. Our theme for this year is “Collaborating Across Boundaries: Government Records and Social Media” and this blog is one of the tools that we have developed to support RACO. We intend to use this blog to discuss the sessions and presentations from the conference and provide a platform to talk about ideas for future RACO conferences here in Washington or hosted by our regions across the nation.

This is a moderated blog. We welcome feedback from our readers. Our comment policy for this blog is posted here and we encourage users to contribute their comments.

The bloggers behind this blog are Paul Wester, Director of the Modern Records Programs; Susan Cummings, Deputy Director of Modern Records Programs; Laurence Brewer, Director of the Lifecycle Management Division; and Arian Ravanbakhsh, an electronic records policy analyst in the Modern Records Programs.