Record Management and Design Reuse

Abstract

Government mandated records management requirements apply to retention and long term archival of a wide variety of records. Part of the attention is on permanent accession and retention by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) but interim requirements for storage by the source agency are included. As government agencies and the Department of Defense move toward implementations, additional goals often include saving design data for reuse. This paper briefly reviews the government records management requirements then investigates candidate meanings of 'reuse' and proposes an enhanced design records retention approach. The recommended strategy that emerges is, for a given program or product family, to invest in rich and readily re-executable preservation of design artifacts for one or two subsequent generations, then downgrade the data in utility through conversions, ultimately reaching the NARA minimum standard for permanent historical-interest archives.