The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) said this week that its Electronic Records Archives (ERA 2.0) system will become available for records scheduling on Sept. 18.
The ERA 2.0 system is an AWS GovCloud-based electronic processing environment and preservation repository that has been under development in recent years to succeed the original ERA system that dates back to 2008. The ERA 2.0 system allows Federal agencies to store public records in the system, and gives NARA staff the ability to search those records and fulfill records requests.
As of March 2022, the ERA 2.0 system was storing 16.6 million files in 100 terabytes of storage, and across all ERA systems, NARA was storing 1.93 billion in one petabyte of storage.
“Since June, ERA 2.0 has been available for agencies to submit transfer requests,” NARA said in a Sept. 5 notice from Chief Records Officer Lawrence Brewer.
“Now, the system will have full functionality for records scheduling,” the notice says. “The majority of previous ERA data, including records schedules and transfer requests, has been migrated into the system. All previously existing user roles have also been migrated.”
NARA also announced the availability of new ERA 2.0 training materials created for agency users.
“Please refer to these training materials as well as the Agency Checklist for ERA 2.0 Launch to prepare to work in the new system,” the agency advised. “If you need to create new accounts in ERA 2.0, you can use the ERA account request form. Additional resources to support ERA 2.0 have been published on our updated AC ERA webpage.”
NARA said in November 2022 that it awarded Fearless a five-year contract worth up to $65.7 million for work on the ERA 2.0 program.