§ 1235.50 What specifications and standards for transfer apply to electronic records?

(a) General. (1) Agencies must transfer electronic records in a format that is independent of specific hardware or software. Except as specified in paragraphs (c) through (e) of this section, the records must be written in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) or Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) with all control characters and other non-data characters removed. Consult NARA about electronic records in other formats, by mail at National Archives and Records Administration; Electronic Records Division (RDE); 8601 Adelphi Road; College Park, MD 20740-6001, or by email at etransfers@nara.gov. (2) Agencies must have advance approval from NARA for compression of the records, and agencies must comply with a request from NARA to provide the software to decompress the records. (3) Agencies interested in transferring scheduled electronic records using a Tape Archive (TAR) utility must contact NARA to initiate transfer discussions, by mail at National Archives and Records Administration; Electronic Records Division (RDE); 8601 Adelphi Road; College Park, MD 20740-6001, or by email at etransfers@nara.gov. (b) Data files and databases. Data files and databases must be transferred to the National Archives of the United States as flat files or as rectangular tables; i.e., as two-dimensional arrays, lists, or tables. All “records” (within the context of the computer program, as opposed to a Federal record) or “tuples,” i.e., ordered collections of data items, within a file or table must have the same logical format. Each data element within a record must contain only one data value. A record must not contain nested repeating groups of data items. The file must not contain extraneous control characters, except record length indicators for variable length records, or marks delimiting a data element, field, record, or file. If records or data elements in different files need to be linked or combined, then each record must contain one or more data elements that constitute primary and/or foreign keys enabling valid linkages between the related records in separate files. (c) Digital geospatial data files. Digital spatial data files must be transferred to the National Archives of the United States in a format that complies with a non-proprietary, published open standard maintained by or for a Federal, national, or international standards organization. Acceptable transfer formats include the Geography Markup Language (GML) as defined by the Open GIS Consortium. (d) Textual documents. Electronic textual documents must be transferred as plain ASCII files; however, such files may contain standard markup language such as Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) or XML tags. (e) Electronic mail, scanned images of textual records, portable document format records, digital photographic records, and web content records. For guidance on transferring these records to NARA, agencies should consult the transfer requirements available online at https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/policy/transfer-guidance.html or upon request from NARA, by mail at National Archives and Records Administration; Electronic Records Division (RDE); 8601 Adelphi Road; College Park, MD 20740-6001, or by email at etransfers@nara.gov.