Ready Access to Essential Evidence. The Strategic Plan of the National Archives and Records Administration, 1997-2007.

摘要

The National Archives and Records Administration is our national record keeper. It is a public trust that safeguards the records on which people of a democratic republic depend for documenting their individual rights, for ensuring the accountability and credibility of their national institutions, and for analyzing their national experience. Both the Government and the public rely on NARA to meet an almost unlimited range of information needs from records. Such records are essential for congressional oversight committees to evaluate agencies, for veterans to prove their entitlements to such benefits as medical care, for citizens to discover their families histories, and for Holocaust survivors to trace assets looted from them by the Nazis. These are just a few of the many uses made of U.S. Government records. The records we preserve and make available every day directly affect the lives of millions of our citizens as well as the understanding we have of our nations history. This document now identifies what we must do during the next seven years to keep faith with the trust that a democratic nation has placed in us. We must reach this plans ambitious goals because NARA is not an ordinary agency. We serve not just today's citizens, but all who are yet to come. We must preserve past documents already in our care, but also prepare to manage tomorrow's records in new and challenging forms. If Americans are to have faith in their public institutions, the records of those institutions must be secure, open, and accessible. Ensuring that they are is what NARA does.