The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration spent $430 million to create an Electronic Records Archive of millions of documents. NARA Inspector General Paul Brachfeld now says that the system is inadequate and disappointing.
Under the currently deployed system, users can search only by metadata. Such information typically includes tags for information, such as name of the original publication, date of publication, agency that originated the document, and a small number of keywords. Users who hope to locate a document by a word or phrase in a document that isn't part of the metadata will be unable to do so.
Lack of text searchability “is an important weakness, and I am not sure it can be corrected,” Brachfeld said.
You can read more in an article by Alice Lipowicz in the Government Computer News web site at http://goo.gl/ztkUA
Admittedly, these flaws will not have much impact on genealogists. The documents in the database are mostly modern documents originally created in electronic formats, not older documents of historical interest that were created years ago on paper.
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