NARA M-23-07 and the End of Paper: What Pennsylvania County Records Offices Need to Know

OMB Memorandum M-23-07 is the federal policy that closed the book on paper as the system of record for the United States government. It set June 30, 2024 as the date by which every federal agency had to manage all permanent records in electronic format, and it directed the National Archives to stop accepting analog transfers after that point. Pennsylvania counties are not bound by a federal memo. But the memo is a signal, and a useful one: it tells county commissioners, recorders of deeds, and prothonotaries exactly where every level of American government is heading, and it hands them a tested digitization standard to borrow.

This post is about the policy driver, not the retention table. Pennsylvania already permits its counties and municipalities to keep permanent records electronically, so the legal scaffolding exists. What M-23-07 changes is the conversation. When the federal government formally ends paper for its own permanent records, "we have always kept it on paper" stops being a defensible posture. For Pennsylvania's 67 counties, the question shifts from whether to digitize permanent records to how to do it to a standard that survives an audit.

What OMB M-23-07 actually requires

Issued jointly by the Office of Management and Budget and the National Archives in December 2022, M-23-07 updated the federal transition to fully electronic recordkeeping. It is short, but its operative dates are unusually firm. Three matter most, and together they describe a one-way door: once a permanent record is created or converted to electronic form under the standard, paper is no longer the authoritative copy.

Read together, those three lines retire paper as the federal system of record. The June 30, 2024 deadline is the headline, but the requirement to digitize legacy analog records before transfer is what reaches backward into decades of accumulated files. The policy does not just stop new paper; it obligates agencies to convert what already exists, to a defined standard, before the Archives will take it.

Why a federal memo matters to a Pennsylvania county

A county clerk in Allentown is not governed by an OMB memorandum; Pennsylvania county records answer to the Commonwealth, not Washington. So why should a recorder of deeds or a prothonotary read M-23-07 at all? Because policy at the top of the system sets the gravity for everything below it, and three practical effects flow downhill quickly.

• The standards model. M-23-07 came with a published digitization standard any government can adopt voluntarily. Counties no longer invent "good enough" from scratch — they can point to a federal regulation when justifying their own specifications.
• The vendor ecosystem. When the federal government mandates electronic permanent records, scanners, capture software, and preservation tools standardize around that requirement. Counties buying in inherit the alignment.
• Expectation, not exemption. Auditors, courts, title companies, and the public increasingly assume government records are digital and instantly retrievable. A paper-only county is the outlier, and being the outlier is harder to defend each year.

There is an operational case underneath the policy case. The federal cost-benefit analysis behind digitization estimates that workers spend roughly 20 to 30 percent of the workday — about 1.6 to 2.5 hours per day — searching for and gathering information. The figure is not specific to county government, but the dynamic is: anyone who has watched a deed-room request return from the basement with the wrong volume understands the tax paper retrieval imposes on a small staff.

The digitization standard the memo brought with it

The most reusable part of M-23-07, for a county, is not the deadline — it is the standard that accompanied it. NARA codified the requirements for digitizing permanent paper records in 36 CFR Part 1236, Subpart E, which sets the standards and procedures an agency must apply when it digitizes permanent paper records using reflective digitization techniques — the ordinary scanning of opaque originals like deed books and minute books.

The point of a digitization standard is that the digital copy can stand in for the original — a higher bar than "we scanned it." A standard addresses image quality, resolution targets, file format, the metadata captured alongside each image, and the validation step that confirms a scan is complete and faithful before the paper is retired. Without that discipline, an organization has a folder of pictures; with it, an organization has a record.

Where Pennsylvania law already stands

Pennsylvania did not wait for a federal memo to permit electronic county records. Under the County Records Act, county records may be retained and disposed of only in accordance with retention schedules promulgated by the County Records Committee, as set out in the PHMC County Records Manual. Those schedules apply to county offices of counties of the second through eighth class. The schedule, not the format, is the controlling authority — and the schedule already contemplates electronic media.

Crucially for the M-23-07 conversation, counties may maintain permanent records electronically in PDF/A format, provided they notify the PHMC of their intent to use PDF/A for each records series. PDF/A is the archival profile of PDF built for long-term preservation — the same family of decisions the federal standard rests on. The series most worth digitizing first are the permanent ones, because they are the records a county will hold and retrieve for generations.

These are not edge cases. Deed books, will books, and commissioner minutes are the spine of the public record in a Pennsylvania county — each retained permanently, and each exactly the kind of analog series the federal government just told its own agencies to digitize before archiving. The alignment between the federal direction and the Pennsylvania framework is the whole point.

Pennsylvania's own end-of-paper precedent: municipalities in 2019

Counties looking for a Pennsylvania precedent for M-23-07 do not have to look across state lines. They can look at the Commonwealth's own municipalities. The PA Municipal Records Manual — approved December 16, 2008 and amended July 23, 2009 and again March 28, 2019 — governs third-class cities, boroughs, incorporated towns, and first- and second-class townships under schedules approved by the Local Government Records Committee.

The 2019 amendment is the local mirror image of the federal memo, arriving five years earlier. Since that update, Pennsylvania municipalities may keep permanent records exclusively in electronic PDF/A form, without a paper or microfilm copy, provided the records are stored on a live server with at least one separately backed-up copy. That is a municipality being permitted to do exactly what M-23-07 later required of federal agencies: treat the electronic copy as the record and let the paper go.

Funding the response: the County Records Improvement Fund

Every county records discussion eventually arrives at money, and Pennsylvania built a dedicated answer into statute. Under 42 P.S. § 21052.1, a $5 fee is charged for each document recorded, in addition to the Recorder of Deeds' standard fee. Of that $5, $2 is deposited into the County Records Improvement Fund and $3 is retained by the Recorder of Deeds for office records management — money explicitly intended to support a comprehensive records management plan.

A County Records Improvement Fund exists in counties of the second-A, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth classes, as well as home rule charter counties of those classes — the large majority of Pennsylvania's counties, and the same ones whose deed books and will books are candidates for digitization. Because the fund is recurring and tied to recording volume, it suits a multi-year conversion program rather than a one-time capital request that competes with every other line in the budget.

A worked example: digitizing a recorder's deed books to standard

Consider a fifth-class Pennsylvania county whose recorder of deeds holds a century of bound deed books. The series is permanent, consulted constantly by title searchers, and deteriorating from handling. The county wants to digitize once and defensibly. Reading M-23-07 as the model, the project sequences like this.

1. Confirm the authority. Verify the series is permanent under the PHMC County Records Manual, then notify the PHMC of intent to maintain it electronically in PDF/A — the legal predicate for treating the digital copy as the record.
2. Write the specification against the federal benchmark. Adopt resolution, image-quality, and metadata targets modeled on 36 CFR Part 1236 Subpart E for reflective digitization, so each page carries the index data — grantor, grantee, book and page — that makes it findable.
3. Capture, validate, and index. Scan to the specification, run a validation pass confirming every page is present and legible before any original leaves the workflow, and load images and metadata into the system title searchers use.
4. Preserve to the PDF/A and backup rule. Store masters in PDF/A on a live server with at least one separately backed-up copy — the posture Pennsylvania already requires of municipalities keeping permanent records electronically.
5. Fund it from the right pocket. Draw on the County Records Improvement Fund, fed by the $5-per-document recording fee, so the work is paid for by recording activity rather than the general fund.

Nothing in that sequence is unique to a fifth-class county; the same five steps scale up to a larger county's prothonotary and register of wills. The lesson is that the federal policy, the Pennsylvania legal framework, and the funding mechanism are not three separate conversations — they are one program, and M-23-07 is the policy that makes the case for starting it now.

Reading the signal: access obligations and what to do now

One thing the digitization signal does not change is the county's obligation to the public. Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law applies to records in any format. Under § 901, an open-records officer must respond to a written request within 5 business days of receipt. The format of the underlying record does not move that clock — but a well-indexed digital archive is what lets a small office actually meet it instead of missing it.

The fee rules cut the same way. The OOR Official RTKL Fee Schedule caps black-and-white photocopies at $0.25 per page for the first 1,000 pages, lets an agency require prepayment when fees are expected to exceed $100, and prohibits any fee for staff time, for searching or retrieving records, or for the agency's response letter. A county cannot bill the public for the labor of digging through paper — one more reason that labor is worth eliminating.

So what should a county official do with M-23-07? Treat it as the signal it is. The federal government has set the destination and published the standard; Pennsylvania law already permits county records to follow; the County Records Improvement Fund supplies the money. The move is to identify the permanent series most painful to retrieve, notify the PHMC, write a specification against the federal benchmark, and convert — starting with the records the county will hold forever. Reynolds Business Systems works with Lehigh Valley and Mid-Atlantic county offices on exactly that sequence, from PHMC-aligned specification through capture and PDF/A preservation.

Frequently asked questions

Does NARA M-23-07 apply to Pennsylvania counties?

No. M-23-07 is an OMB and NARA policy that binds federal agencies, not Pennsylvania county or municipal governments. Counties are governed by the Commonwealth's County Records Act and the PHMC County Records Manual. The memo still matters to counties as a standards model and a signal of where government recordkeeping is heading.

What is the deadline in M-23-07?

M-23-07 required every federal agency to manage all permanent records in electronic format by June 30, 2024. After that date, NARA no longer accepts analog transfers, and starting July 1, 2024 agencies must digitize permanent records created in analog formats before transferring them to the National Archives.

Who approves county records retention schedules in Pennsylvania?

The County Records Committee promulgates retention and disposition schedules under the County Records Act, published in the PHMC County Records Manual. County records may be retained and disposed of only in accordance with those schedules. The schedules apply to county offices of counties of the second through eighth class.

Can Pennsylvania counties keep permanent records electronically?

Yes. Counties may maintain permanent records electronically using the PDF/A format, but must notify the PHMC of their intent to use PDF/A for each records series. PDF/A is the archival PDF profile built for long-term preservation, which is why both Pennsylvania and the federal digitization standards favor it for permanent records.

Can Pennsylvania municipalities keep permanent records electronically?

Yes. Since the 2019 update to the Municipal Records Manual, Pennsylvania municipalities may keep permanent records exclusively in electronic PDF/A form without a paper or microfilm copy, provided the records are stored on a live server with at least one separately backed-up copy. It is the local precedent for the federal end-of-paper direction.

What is the PA County Records Manual?

It is the PHMC publication that sets retention and disposition schedules for Pennsylvania county records, by record series, under the County Records Act. Issued by the County Records Committee, it tells each county office how long to keep a series and when it may be disposed of, and it covers counties of the second through eighth class.

What digitization standard should a Pennsylvania county follow?

A county is not legally required to follow the federal rule, but 36 CFR Part 1236 Subpart E — the standard for digitizing permanent paper records using reflective techniques — is a strong benchmark to borrow. Combine it with PDF/A storage and the required PHMC notification per series to make the electronic copy defensible.

How can a Pennsylvania county fund records digitization?

Through the County Records Improvement Fund. Under 42 P.S. § 21052.1, a $5 fee is charged per recorded document; $2 goes to the fund and $3 is retained by the Recorder of Deeds for records management. The fund exists in second-A, third through eighth class, and home rule counties of those classes.

Is Pennsylvania an open records state?

Yes. Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law (Act 3 of 2008) presumes government records are public unless an exemption applies. An agency's open-records officer must respond to a written request within 5 business days of receipt, and a requester may appeal a denial to the Office of Open Records within 15 business days.

Can I view Pennsylvania public records for free?

Inspecting records generally carries no charge, and under the RTKL no fee may be charged for staff time, searching, or retrieval. Copies do carry fees: the OOR fee schedule caps black-and-white photocopies at $0.25 per page for the first 1,000 pages, and an agency may require prepayment when fees are expected to exceed $100.