State Offices Not Saving Email Records
We already know the White House has trouble archiving and organizing its e-mail record. Now we learn that state by state, the e-mail records from governors' offices and their aides are often just as muddled.
According to a recent Associated Press poll, while the majority of U.S. states' laws view e-mail records the same as paper, many do not require all e-mail to be saved. Instead, the decisions on when records should be turned over to the public as a part of a Freedom of Information request or how long they need to be maintained before being destroyed is often made on a case-by-case basis.
Some governors' offices have received criticism for the way certain records have been destroyed. For example, Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle's chief of staff was accused of spending a little quality time with some prostitutes while on an official state trip to the Philippines. An Associated Press request for calendar and e-mail records found that the electronic records had already been purged. Lingle's office said e-mail is deleted every two months, and since the chief of staff didn't save his e-mail to his hard drive or print out hard copies, there would be no way to retrieve them. On top of that, after the chief of staff resigned due to this scandal, his computer hard drive was wiped before the machine was assigned to his successor.
Kevin Joerling of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators said he didn't think the states were intending to do the wrong thing. They just don't realize how important it is to hold on to all parts of the public record. Still, he thinks saving every piece of communication isn't necessary. Much e-mail, as we all know, amounts to little more than chatter.
The old concern that saving all correspondence is too difficult and takes up too much space is no longer relevant, according to some. William Tolson, of Mimosa Systems, a California-based company that sells e-mail archiving software, said archiving systems can store hundreds of millions of e-mails for years. Hawaii State Senator Les Ihara agrees. "You can store virtually everything. The rationale that we need to purge in order to save space is moot." [Source: USA Today]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Gary said 12:42PM on 7-20-2008
Did you know that the Federal Government requires retention of HARD COPIES of all official records, and that the definition of "offical records" covers just about everything? In this day and age, it's a ridiculous requirement.
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dwr50 said 7:09PM on 7-14-2008
Everything on the net is saved. Finding it is the problem... hence Google.
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Cat said 8:14AM on 7-21-2008
Why save it all? We don't save all the paper either? After a certain amount of time the paper goes away as well.
And yes, you can save it all, but when you get asked to produce the three emails about a particular topic the costs in finding those three emails, especially out of billions of email is way too large.
It can be done, but not cheaply - so if everyone wants all email saved expect to have your taxes increased as archiving systems require constant maintenance ( so add some more IT folks - who are paid quite well) and there will be a need for additional reviewers (mostly attorneys - who are not cheap) to review the requests for confidential information before releasing.
Keeping it all is not a solution! Keeping what is important is - and this requires guidelines and training for all government employees - I would have liked to know if the AP checked if records management training was required of state employees? I suspect it is not!
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