The National Records and Records Administration (NARA) maintains more than 12 billion pages of physical records, 42 million photographs, and 500 terabytes of electronic records. Now that puts a new perspective on big data.
By 2015, it is expected that the main federal government agencies will be managing 20.4 billion records. The amount of money spent managing this data exceeds $35 million. Federal agencies are also up against a mandate that requires them to transition to full management of emails by 2016, and to full management of electronic systems by 2019. This interesting information was found on the blog, Formtek, in their post, “Records Managements: Slowly, Federal Agencies are Achieving Improved Records Handling.”
This growth and added pressure from the mandate are combining to make records management very complicated and unsustainable. Most agencies know they need outside help and are looking for alternatives.
One way to ensure findability, even with big data issues, is through a taxonomy. A standards-based taxonomy can help you provides clear order to your data, which enables comprehensive search results. Standards are key to a solid taxonomy and comprehensive indexing.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
