State government electronic records in the news

Two stories relating to the management and continued accessibility of state government records popped up on my radar screen earlier today. Both of them warrant watching; it doesn't seem as if either situation will be resolved any time soon.

The first involves gubernatorial records, an ever-present matter of interest and concern. Earlier today, the Boston Globe reported that during the last days of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's tenure as governor of Massachusetts, eleven of his high-ranking staffers used personal funds to purchase their state-supplied hard drives and laptops, staff replaced all of the other computers in the governor's office, and all Romney-era e-mail was deleted from the office's e-mail servers. When Deval Patrick, a Democrat, took office, he and his staffers found an electronic blank slate.

Romney's position is that staffers who purchased hardware did so openly and that he and his staffers complied with all records laws. It does seem that the Romney administration did transfer a substantial body of records to the Massachusetts Archives: according to the Globe, the the repository holds 700-800 boxes of paper records documenting the Romney administration. However, it's not clear whether these records include print copies of the e-mails. The Globe doesn't provide detailed information about them, and the Massachusetts Archives doesn't have an online catalog or detailed online finding aids.

Secretary of State Bill Galvin, who oversees the Massachusetts Archives, told the Globe that the hardware purchases strike him as odd and that the gubernatorial e-mail should have come to the archives: "Electronic records are held to the same standard as paper records. There’s no question. They’re not in some lesser standard."

Romney's campaign manager asserts that the Patrick administration is making a stink about the hardware purchases, computer replacement, and e-mail deletion because it is acting as "an opposition research arm of the Obama reelection campaign." After the Globe story appeared this morning, he filed a state Freedom of Information Act request seeking "all email correspondence, phone logs, and visitor logs" documenting contacts between Patrick administration staffers and prominent Obama political advisers David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and Jim Messina. Governor Patrick’s chief legal counsel has stated that staff will "be happy to fulfill" this request.

I'm not an expert on Massachusetts records laws, so I'm going to have wait for the experts to weigh in on whether the actions of Governor Romney and his staff were legal. Do I wish that the e-mail had been preserved? Of course I do. I'm an archivist, and my job is to preserve records of enduring value and to provide access to them. Gubernatorial correspondence and internal memoranda, regardless of format, do have enduring value. Do I think that Governor Romney should be pilloried for destroying the e-mail? If he violated the law, I hope he gets what's coming to him. If he didn't, I hope that Governor Patrick and other Massachusetts politicians focus on strengthening laws concerning the retention and disposition of gubernatorial records.

Do I think that Governor Patrick brought up these issues in an effort to give President Obama a boost? I don't know. Patrick and Obama are close allies, so it's possible. However, I'm also under the impression that Governor Patrick has his own reasons for disliking Governor Romney, and I'm open to the possibility that he and his staffers are discussing the matter because they keep getting freedom of information requests for Romney-era records. I must admit that I am curious as to how well the Patrick administration is managing its own records.

The second relates to an outrage. As anyone who's been paying even the slightest attention to the American news media knows, former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was recently arrested on charges that he sexually molested eight young boys. Two university administrators have been charged with perjury, and the university's president and football coach have lost their jobs.

Questions as to precisely what the president, the coach, and other university administrators knew about Sandusky and when they knew it are rampant. However, Pennsylvania's Right to Know Law, which was extensively revised in 2008, explicitly exempts most records created by Penn State, Lincoln University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple University. As a result, there is a distinct possibility that only those e-mails, phone records, and other Penn State records introduced in open court will be disclosed to the public -- unless, as the New York Times urged earlier today, the Pennsylvania legislature and governor move to lift this exemption.

Publicly funded universities in many other states -- New York included -- are subject to freedom of information laws. For what it's worth, I really don't see why Penn State, Pitt, Temple, and Lincoln should be granted such sweeping exemptions, and I hope that Pennsylvania's law changes. At the very least, I hope that Penn State's new administrators recognize that openness and honesty are essential to restoring the university's good name and start releasing records of their own accord as soon as prosecutors permit them to do so.

Yes, I know that Penn State is going to be hit with civil lawsuit after civil lawsuit and that its lawyers would probably jump for joy if a fire or flood destroyed a ton of university records. However, the lawsuits will come and the cost of settling them will be staggeringly high no matter what the university does.

Of course, Penn State is not the only entity that has relevant records: Sandusky met the boys he is accused of sexually assaulting through The Second Mile, a charitable organization that he founded. However, earlier today, the New York Times reported that investigators have yet to locate some important Second Mile records:

Officials at the Second Mile . . . reported that several years of the organization’s records were missing and had perhaps been stolen. The missing files, investigators worry, may limit their ability to determine if Sandusky used charity resources — expense accounts, travel, gifts — to recruit new victims, or even buy their silence . . . .

Much of the [charity's] older paperwork was stored at an off-site records facility. The travel and expense records, for instance, had been sent over several years earlier. But select members of the charity’s board of directors were alarmed to learn recently that when the records facility went to retrieve them, some of those records — from about 2000 to 2003 — were missing.

. . . . Subsequently, the [Second Mile] foundation located apparently misfiled records from one of the years, but the rest seem to have disappeared.

As awful as the Sandusky-Penn State situation currently appears, I can't help but think that we've seen only the tip of the iceberg. All the more reason to be as honest and as open as possible. The sooner the truth comes out, the sooner the victims can focus on rebuilding their lives and the sooner Penn State can focus on rebuilding itself.

Ilinois politics

Just one more thing before I hie myself to bed: I think New York State has just lost the Most Spectacular Gubernatorial Implosion of 2008 competition. Eliot Spitzer -- the crusading former prosecutor with a call-girl habit -- seems to have been roundly beaten by Rod Blagejovich of Illinois.

Shaking down the CEO of a children's hospital. Pressuring a newspaper to fire unfriendly editors. Trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat to the highest bidder. Wow. If only a handful of the allegations -- all of which are apparently supported by damning evidence -- are true, Rod Blagejovich deserves to spend a long, long time in federal prison.

Illinois may well experience an unplanned gubernatorial transition before the year's end. Having been through such a transition earlier this year, I feel for my colleagues at the Illinois State Archives. Their work lives are about become even more interesting than usual.

Doonesbury, archivists, and partisanship

In case you missed it, a "Library of Congress archivist" was featured in the September 21 installment of Doonesbury. Violet McPhee, a repeat guest on Mark Slackmeyer's radio show, has brought a document that she describes as "an extremely valuable acquisition": the original copy of the "the founding document of the modern hate-speech movement--Newt Gingrich's famous GOPAC memo." This "Magna Carta of attack politics" tells "Republican candidates to smear opponents with words like 'sick, disgrace, corrupt, cheat, decay, pathetic, radical, traitor, anti-family, greed,' and so on," thus codifying "the toxic rhetoric that came to define an era!" The document even has "the original mudstains--so prized by curators!"

I've been a Doonesbury fan since I was about twelve, and I'm always fascinated when our low-profile profession is depicted in popular culture. Violet McPhee, an amply proportioned and bespectacled woman of a certain age, looks like a number of archivists I've known--and, in all likelihood, she looks like the archivist that I'll be about ten years from now. Garry Trudeau has obviously had some experience with archives, as evidenced by the nicely drawn tan clamshell box that houses the GOPAC memo; the memo itself is enclosed in a sheet protector meant to be inserted into a three-ring notebook, which is a bit off, but some repositories do use archival-quality sheet protectors of this sort.

Why McPhee needs to bring the document to a radio show is beyond me, but Garry Trudeau is entitled to a little artistic license. I also doubt that GOPAC's records are or ever will be at the Library of Congress or any other repository--when I was a student assistant at the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives, I learned that, with the exception of the Conservative Party, which donated a great collection to the department, all of New York State's party organizations had tossed their older records--but it's not impossible.

I fully recognize that Trudeau is merely using the character of the archivist to make a political point. However, Violet McPhee's lengthy, overtly partisan description of the GOPAC memo brings to mind the real-world nastiness in which some of my fellow archivists have been indulging as of late. Don't get me wrong: I'm a lifelong Democrat who made a conscious decision to live in a "blue" state, and I'm impatiently waiting for the Obama campaign to send me the car magnet it promised me. However, as I've noted before, some of the statements that John Dean made at SAA's 2008 annual meeting and some of the "questions" asked by audience members crossed the line into naked partisanship. Some of the comments that have been posted to various archival listservs during the past couple of weeks have been similarly one-sided and provocative.

I realize that there is a close and hotly contested Presidential race going on, that the economy may well be disintegrating before our eyes, and that the current Presidential administration has proven itself to be no friend of records, archives, or governmental accountability. I firmly believe that the profession has the right and the obligation to draw attention to this--or any other--administration's records-related deficiencies and that individual archivists should be free to make known their support for a given party, candidate, or policy.

However, we're not doing the profession any favors by being openly contemptuous of people who happen not to share our individual political views. I strongly suspect that most archivists are Democrats, but there are a substantial number of Republicans in our ranks. All of the Republican archivists I've known have been committed, thoughtful, and smart people, and they deserve to get through the workday without being demeaned by their colleagues. A little spirited debate is one thing--heck, one of my Republican colleagues sometimes goes out of his way to get the debate going! Disdain and abuse are another.

Moreover, we need to remain mindful that, as inconspicuous as we generally are, we have awesome superpowers: we are the shapers and keepers of the historical record. As the SAA Code of Ethics states, we must use these superpowers appropriately, i.e., we must "exercise professional judgment in acquiring, appraising, and processing historical materials" and avoid allowing our "personal beliefs or perspectives to affect" our professional decisions. I would add that we should also strive to avoid giving the impression that we might allow our personal beliefs to color our professional decisions in ways that might damage or distort the historical record.

Again, I think it's a matter of degree: it's alright to express dislike of or disagreement with a given leader, organization, social movement, etc., but we also have to keep emphasizing that, individually and collectively, we are committed to ensuring that the historical record is as comprehensive and accurate as possible. I know it's really hard sometimes, but let's exercise a little restraint, okay?