Electronic Records Archives
The Electronic Records Archives (ERA) is a program of the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to preserve electronic records as part of the U.S. government's broader records management process. The program began in 1998 and started to accept records in 2008. As of 2017, NARA was working to overhaul the system in an effort called "ERA 2.0." History Efforts by U.S. government archivists to preserve electronic records date to the 1960s but the task took on heightened importance toward the end of the 20th century, as the volume and variety of government-produced digital records expanded. 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. No system in the agency could handle that volume. Even if we expanded existing systems a hundredfold, we still could not handle the simple workload of copying those files." In 1998, NARA launched