FCW.com: “When President Barack Obama signed a memorandum on the management of government records in November 2011, some touted it as the first significant action on the topic since Harry Truman signed the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act in 1949 and the Federal Records Act in 1950. More than six decades and 7 billion network devices later, the problem of how and what to archive among the endless piles of federal records — 4.75 billion pages in the last 10 years, according to the National Archives and Records Administration — has gained both operational and political currency. The often-arcane conversation about record storage was pushed into the spotlight recently when the Internal Revenue Service was unable to produce about two years of emails from former IRS Commissioner Lois Lerner and six other employees because of what the agency called a “hardware crash.” How on earth, critics asked, could emails be lost because of hardware malfunctions, particularly in an administration that is the first in decades to spend any serious time thinking about records management? That particular answer is yet to be revealed. But while many agencies have been developing and adopting strategies to manage their records electronically, the events at the IRS demonstrate — at best — a startling disconnect between policy and implementation. Certainly, this is not the first time government emails have mysteriously vanished. In 2007, the Bush’s administration claimed to have lost emails having to do with the dismissal of U.S. attorneys. A similar email disappearance happened in the Clinton administration in 2000. Those instances, however, predated the institution of federal policies intended to bring record management into the 21st century. The presidential memorandum of 2011 and a directive by the Office of Management and Budget and National Archives in 2012 created strict guidelines and deadlines for agencies to work toward managing their records electronically. According to the memorandum, agencies must manage all email records in an electronic format – no more printing and storing — by the end of 2016. By the end of 2019, all permanent electronic records held by federal agencies must be managed electronically to the fullest extent possible. As things stand now, many agencies have a limited capacity for electronic email storage. When an employee reaches that capacity, she has to go through and determine what qualifies as a record that must be saved. Sounds simple enough, albeit somewhat time-consuming. But, according to April Chen, project manager at record-storage firm Iron Mountain Government Services, there are as many as 500 retention categories laid out as part of the general records schedule.”