Electronic Records that need to be kept forever, - accept all types or set standards?

The US National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) ERA program has the following objectives;

• To preserve any type of electronic records,
• created using any type of application,
• on any computing platform,
• delivered on any digital media
• from any entity in the Federal Government and any donor,
• to provide discovery and delivery to anyone with an interest and legal right of access,
• Now and for the „Life of the Republic”.

NARA is currently working hard to achieve this with the help of Lockheed Martin, and this program has since 1999 received more than 400 million USD in financial support. Their approach is quite different than many other national archives that describe in detail how government agencies shall hand over electronic records to the national archive, e.g. TNA2002 in the UK and Noark 4 in Norway. Noark 4 even describes the format and compression you must use for electronic records that will be transferred to the national archive. I would love NARA to reach their objectives but a more practical solution seems to be to set standards. For more information about NARA’s ERA program: http://www.archives.gov/era/