NARA selects Lockheed for its e-records program

The National Archives and Records Administration awarded Lockheed Martin a $308 million contract this morning to design and develop the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) program.

The Lockheed team also includes EDS, BearingPoint, Science Applications International Corp. and History Associates.

Lockheed and Harris had been dueling for a year for the contract to design the electronic archives, which could have a total value of $500 million.

ERA is a federal effort to save the government's records — regardless of format — and make them available on future hardware and software.

Last August, NARA officials announced design contracts worth about $20 million, with the Lockheed award valued at $9.5 million and the Harris award valued at $10.6 million.

Each company proposed a different blueprint for the long-term preservation system, which NARA hopes to have in place by 2011.

An evolving framework of hardware and operating systems would sit at the top three levels of the Harris system, allowing it to continually adapt to hardware and software changes, NARA officials said last summer.

Lockheed’s single-level system will have front, middle and back sections, NARA officials said. It will be introduced in five phases and will have an interface designed to improve recordkeeping.

Last summer, NARA officials emphasized that electronic archiving will solve problems beyond the federal government's own needs. For example, doctors could access a patient's electrocardiograms, regardless of changes that have occurred in machine hardware and storage since the test was performed.