Standards of Interest to the FIRM Council

Take a FIRM Stand!

Standard ~ Something from which to digress.

The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them from which to choose.

- Authors Unknown

OMB Circular A-119 encourages agencies to use and participate in the development of voluntary consensus standards, including international standards. Raines' Rules require agencies to avoid customized solutions and to use standards-compliant commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) applications whenever possible. OMB Circular A-76 suggests that agencies should refrain from engaging in activities that are not inherently governmental in nature. OMB Circular A-123 requires standards for internal controls, including documentation that is promptly recorded, properly classified, and readily available for examination. In Exhibit 300B (Part II.E) to accompany budget requests for information technology projects, OMB Circular A-11 (Part 3, p. 548) requires agencies to:

Identify the pertinent standards for information exchange and resource sharing
Demonstrate adherence to governmentwide standards (e.g., DoD 5015.2)
Identify the use of COTS software

Several elements of the President's December 17, 1999, E-gov directive are also highly pertinent. The first directs agencies to organize and promote access to information in ways that citizens are likely to seek it. (FOIA requires requesters to "reasonably describe" the records they seek.) The fifth directive requires agency officials to make their E-mail addresses more readily available for questions from the public. E-mail is designed for quick, informal communications and is appropriately used for such purposes. However, it is not designed to manage or provide efficient, controlled access to substantive, authoritative records. (Records are documents that have been processed so as to have sufficient value to meet business requirements that are more than ephemeral in nature.) The President's ninth directive requires agencies to use the Internet to become "... more open, efficient, and responsive ..." Openness and efficiency require the adoption and use of standards. Responsiveness depends upon a metadata standard by which government E-records may be queried and retrieved via the Internet in terms that are meaningful to the average citizen.

Here are summaries of the standards that have been identified by the FIRM E-records Standards Committee as being of interest to records managers. If you would like to summarize additional standards, please download and fill out this template and then transmit it to Alice Gannon, CRM, chair of the Standards Committee.

DoD 5015.2 - Electronic Records Management Systems
DASL -WebDAV Searching and Locating
DMA - Document Management Alliance
EAD - Encoded Archival Description
ISO 9000 - Quality Management Systems
LDAP - Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
ODMA - Open Document Management Application Program Interface
WebDAV - Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning
WfMC - Workflow Management Coalition
X.500 - The International Directory Standard
X.509 - Digital Certificates for Digital Signatures
XFA - Extensible Forms Architecture
XFDL - Extensible Forms Description Language
XML - Extensible Markup Language
Z39.50 - Distributed Library Catalog Searching

Other Indices of Pertinent Standards

European Commission's Open Information Interchange (OII).* See especially:

Archiving Standards

RMS-CA - Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies
EAD - Encoded Archival Description
ISAAR - International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families

ANSI X12 - American National Standards for Electronic Business Transactions
UN/EDIFACT - United Nations Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport

Library of Congress (LOC)
Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM)

*Martin Bryan of The Diffuse Project advises that OII's links will be replaced by a new service at http://www.diffuse.org

Regulations governing electronic records management are set forth in 36 CFR 1234.10(d), (h), and (m) and 1234.20(a), which require agency heads to:

Establish procedures for addressing records management requirements, including recordkeeping requirements and disposition, before approving any new electronic information system or enhancements to existing systems.
Specify the location, manner, and media in which electronic records will be maintained to meet operational and archival requirements, and maintain inventories of electronic information systems to facilitate disposition.
Review electronic information systems periodically to ensure that records have been properly classified to reflect current informational content and usage.
Ensure that disposition instructions are incorporated into the design of any electronic system that produces, uses, or stores data files.

In accord with Circular A-119 and Raines' Rules, standards-compliant COTS systems should be used whenever possible. FIRM's E-records Standards Committee plans to propose a standard set of metadata to describe and classify all U.S. federal E-records. Australia has proposed the adoption of an international standard. Here are some of the metadata sets that should be considered.

FIRM Home Page
"Official" version of this page on FIRM Web site.
Proposed Initiatives for the FIRM E-records Standards Committee

This page last modified by Owen Ambur on May 9, 2000 (Links to FIRM Home Page updated January 12, 2010)