The urgent need to fix federal archiving policies.

President Barack Obama's decision last week to revive the Freedom of Information Act was a good first step toward fulfilling his campaign pledge for a "new era of open government."

Here's an idea for a good second step: Force the federal agencies to file and maintain all the records they're creating now, so that in the future when citizens file FOIA requests to declassify documents, they won't receive a form letter that reads, "Sorry, no such documents exist."

A 2005 report by the National Archives and Records Administration—which was declassified just this week under a FOIA suit filed by the National Security Archive, a private research organization at George Washington University—concluded that, in an era when nearly all records are stored on hard drives, rather than typed on paper, the raw bits of history are evaporating.

"Electronic records," the study found, "are generally not disposed of in accordance" with federal regulations. In particular, many e-mails are "being destroyed prematurely," for several reasons.

First, some officials write e-mail on their personal computers—perhaps for convenience, perhaps to evade the rules—and fail to turn in those files. Second, "because electronic records are less tangible than paper records," the report notes, officials "often do not consider them to be records needing to be filed and retired properly." Third, in many offices, the job of "records custodian" rotates frequently; it is often left vacant for a long time; and when the vacancy is filled, National Archives officials aren't notified so that they can come to train the new gatekeeper. In short, expertise has greatly declined. Fourth, the number of records custodians has also declined "substantially over the past decade."

Finally—and this is simply stunning—the National Archives' technology branch is so antiquated that it cannot process some of the most common software programs. Specifically, the study states, the archives "is still unable to accept Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint slides."

This is a huge lapse. Nearly all internal briefings in the Pentagon these days are presented as PowerPoint slides. Officials told me three years ago that if an officer wanted to make a case for a war plan or a weapons program or just about anything, he or she had better make the case in PowerPoint—or forget about getting it approved.

And now, it turns out, all those presentations may be lost to the ether.

It used to be worse. The report notes that the National Archives only "recently"—it doesn't say how recently—revised its procedures so that it could accept e-mail with attachments, scanned text documents, PDFs, digital photos, and Web content. (And Obama's aides were shocked when the White House wireless system shut down the other day.)

The National Archives is developing an "Electronic Records Archive," so that it can finally deal with Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. But, according to the study, that is being "planned for implementation in the next seven years." (Italics added.) The study was written four years ago; so, assuming the program is still on track, it will be up and running three years from now, when Obama's first term is almost over.