“Many federal agencies made the shift to remote work look easy, but the pandemic hasn’t been as kind to agencies that primarily deal with paper…”
“The National Personnel Records Center anticipates it’ll take 18-to-24 months to resolve the backlog, Scott Levins, the NPRC director, said in a recent interview.
But that timeline depends on several factors, including the agency’s ability to work with other federal departments, hire more staff and, most importantly, digitize its existing trove of military records and share them with VA and others…”
“‘Currently we’ve increased [record requests from VA] to consistently over 10,000 requests a week. The backlog’s reached a point where it’s leveled off; it’s not growing any further,’ Levins said. ‘But what we need to do is reverse the trend and start bringing it down, and we do that by leveraging technology and additional resources at the same time.’
The NPRC has received funding to hire 100 additional employees, and VA has funding to kick off military record digitization efforts in earnest. The department is working with a private vendor to set up additional digitization capabilities inside the NPRC, Levins said…” Read the full article here.
Source: Pandemic-induced backlog sparks new efforts to digitize military records at NARA – By Nicole Ogrysko, June 7, 2021. Federal News Network.
