National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

The National Archives and Records Administration is an independent federal agency that serves as the nation's recordkeeper. NARA holds billions of documents, photographs, maps, audiovisual materials, and electronic records created by the federal government across its entire history. The agency is responsible for appraising, preserving, and making accessible the permanently valuable records of all three branches of the federal government. It also sets records management policy for the entire executive branch, overseeing how agencies create, maintain, and ultimately dispose of federal records.

What is NARA?

NARA was established as an independent agency in 1985, separated from the General Services Administration. It operates the National Archives Building in Washington DC, the National Archives at College Park in Maryland, fourteen presidential libraries, and regional archives facilities across the country. The Federal Records Act, the Presidential Records Act, and the National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984 form the legal foundation for NARA's mission and authorities.

NARA's procurement activity centers on its ongoing digital transformation effort. The agency is under a congressional mandate to transition to fully electronic records management across the federal government, and it is modernizing its own systems to handle the volume and complexity of born-digital federal records. Procurement categories include digitization services for paper and audiovisual records, cloud storage and data management infrastructure, IT systems modernization, archival management software, and professional services for records management consulting. NARA uses standard FAR-based procurement through GSA Schedules and its own open market acquisitions.

Why it matters for contractors

NARA is a niche but steady buyer for contractors with expertise in digitization, document management, archival systems, and IT modernization. The agency's electronic records initiative creates long-term demand for cloud infrastructure services, intelligent document processing solutions that can index and make searchable large volumes of historical records, and integration services that connect NARA's systems with the records management systems of other federal agencies. Contractors in the digital preservation and content management space should treat NARA's annual procurement forecast as a planning input.

Data rights considerations are especially important in NARA contracts. Because NARA holds records that are fundamentally public in nature, the agency has strong policy preferences for open standards, data portability, and government ownership of all processed outputs. Contractors proposing proprietary formats or platform lock-in approaches face uphill evaluations. FAR Subpart 27.4 data rights provisions and NARA-specific records management clauses both shape what contractors can and cannot retain from NARA contract performance.

Example

A digital services firm specializing in large-scale document conversion wins a NARA contract to digitize approximately four million pages of World War II military service records currently held on fragile paper and microfilm. The contract requires the firm to scan records at specified resolution standards, generate metadata conforming to NARA's archival description standards, and deliver searchable PDF and TIFF files with quality assurance sampling rates defined in the performance work statement. The digitized records are loaded into NARA's online access system, making them available to the public and to veterans' families researching service histories. NARA retains unlimited rights to all digitized files and metadata under the contract's data rights clauses.