SAA 2017: Local Government Records Section

Water lily in Lake Zither, Lan Su Chinese Garden, Portland Oregon, 26 July 2016.

Greetings from Portland, Oregon and the 2017 annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. Thanks to a happy accident of scheduling, this afternoon I was able to attend the meeting of the Local Government Records Section, which consistently punches well above its weight. Today's meeting focused on documentation of citizen activism in local government records and featured Mary Hansen (Archives and Records Management Division, Portland, Oregon), Christina Bryant (City Archives and Special Collections, New Orleans Public Library), Jamie Seemiller (Denver Public Library), Anne Frantilla (Seattle Municipal Archives), and John Slate (Dallas Municipal Archives). Local government records don't always get a lot of respect from researchers, the public, or -- sadly -- some archivists, and this quintet highlighted just how varied and compelling they can be. Key takeaways:

• Activism often involves some form of engagement or interaction with government, and local government records are a particularly rich source of such interactions. In addition, they contain information about local groups and local topics of concern and citizen perspectives (e.g., those of homemakers or street musicians) that might not be well documented in other collections.
• During the middle decades of the twentieth century, urban police departments created surveillance files detailing the activities of suspected communist groups, labor unions, civil rights organizations, women's groups, and other known or suspected radicals. Although many of us might find the fact of their creation objectionable (and late twentieth-century courts in many states ordered the police to stop creating such file), they are a rich source of information about activist groups.
• City council minutes are an excellent source of information about local and grassroots organizations. Members of these groups offer formal testimony at meetings, and some city councils have "open mike" times that enable any citizen who wishes to speak on any topic to do so. Council records also include citizen petitions and other materials submitted by local activists.
• Localities' efforts to manage demonstrations are documented in records created by city, town, and village councils and boards, mayors or city managers, police departments, and departments of public works. Commissions established to study the aftermath of demonstrations in which participants clashed with police or caused substantial property damage also generate significant records.
• In some instances, local government officials and local government bodies are themselves consciously activist, and their activist work is reflected in the records. Council minutes, for example, may document female members' efforts to combat discrimination against women in municipal employment.
• Evidence of activism may pop up in the unlikeliest of places. For example, records maintained by parks departments in localities that practiced de facto or de jure racial segregation may contain letters and petitions from African-Americans seeking improvements in parks situated in their neighborhoods or seeking equal access to municipal recreational facilities.
• The records of historic preservation commissions and zoning boards amply document grassroots support for and opposition to preservation efforts and land use policies.
• Some local government archivists proactively solicit donation of materials documenting activist activity -- and discover that doing so means shifting from a focus on researchers to a focus on donors that may be a bit disorienting. Such shifts require proactive efforts to secure deeds of gift and quietly cull donations in ways that avoid offending or injuring the donors. Archivists working in collecting repositories are accustomed to doing these things, but those working in government repositories may be less adept at doing so.

Update, 28 July 2016: post title changed to reflect content of post. ("Day two" is not a compelling title.)

Government IT investments

A couple of days ago, the New York Times published an article by David Halbfinger that highlights major problems with a City of New York information technology project. Shortly after Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, the city opted to allocate $66 million to modernizing the system that manages information about the municipal workforce. At the time of this writing, the city has spent $363 million for a system that does far less than initially planned. What went wrong? According to Halbfinger, who relied heavily upon records requested in accordance with the New York State Freedom of Information Law, several things:

• The Bloomberg administration was so intent on proving that outside consultants could streamline government that it failed to heed early signs that things were going wrong
• The individuals given responsibility for administering the project did not have the power to make pivotal decisions and overlooked numerous cost-saving opportunities
• The administration reacted to an early security failure by giving Accenture, the consulting firm responsible for developing the software, responsibility for defining precisely what the new system should do -- something that private corporations are loath to do for cost reasons
• City agencies kept fighting over the system's features and functionality -- the city was slow to give a single person responsibility for setting policy -- and Accenture repeatedly made and undid changes as a result
• Managers realized late in the game that they never wrote user instructions or provided training for staff responsible for using the new system and scrambled to cobble together documentation in the days prior to its rollout

At present, the new system is functional -- sort of. Although most City of New York employees can now access their personnel information online, retired employees and tens of thousands of Dept. of Education paraprofessonals and support staffers are currently not represented in the system. Moreover, at some point the city decided not to integrate management of its civil service system into its new personnel system. As a result, the civil service system that was developed in the 1980s is going to remain operational for the foreseeable future.

This is not the only government IT investment gone horribly wrong. The Bloomberg administration planned to spend $70 million developing CityTime, a modern municipal employee payroll system. To date, the city has spent $740 million, has a system that still isn't fully functional, and has suffered the humiliation of having the feds indict a bunch of CityTime contractors and consultants on charges of offering and accepting kickbacks. Several years ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation junked its Virtual Case File system, which cost over $100 million, after it determined that the system was already outdated and simply couldn't replace its paper-based records management system. Similar horror stories abound at the federal, state, and local government level. Billions of taxpayer dollars that could have been put to better use have been squandered, and I don't even want to think about how difficult it's going to be to pull archival data out of some of these hideously expensive, deeply flawed systems.

Given the frequency with which government IT investments go bad, it's not surprising that some people -- including several of the readers who commented on Halbfinger's article -- conclude that governments are inherently bad at making IT purchases and that we simply shouldn't expect otherwise.

I don't think that this is the case, and I started writing this post with the intent of articulating a few strategies for avoiding the sorts of problems that the City of New York, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and countless other government entities have encountered. However, upon second thought, I think I'm going to save these ideas for another post, simply because the problems that Halbfinger's article highlights are so fundamental that mere "strategies" can't solve them.

Personnel system project leaders and the Bloomberg administration itself knew that major problems existed and did nothing about them. The rollout of the first component of the personnel management system, which was completed in 2002, resulted in a massive security breach. Staff responsible for monitoring the system's development asserted in 2003 that "no sense of economy, efficiency or value is evident in any area of the project," but no one in a position of power paid any attention to their findings. Moreover, no government official has been fired or demoted as a result of the problems associated with this project.

In essence, what we have here is a woeful failure of leadership. No one in a position of power kept the scope and mission of the project from shifting and expanding, prevented city agencies from issuing multiple, competing change requests, or intervened as the contractor's bills skyrocketed. The City of New York did hire a private-sector project manager who was nominally responsible for keeping the project on track, but he quit after less than a year and has become an outspoken critic of the city's handling of the project. It also hired a human relations expert who was supposed to establish one city-wide personnel policy -- more than eight years after the personnel system project got underway. He returned to the private sector after less than six months in the city's employ.

At best, the Bloomberg administration failed to appreciate the differences between a multi-agency, public-sector operating environment and a single-entity, private-sector operating environment. At worst, it simply assumed that the public sector was inherently incapable of operating effectively and that the consultant would simply do an end run around the dysfunction -- real and perceived -- of the public sector. Instead of tackling the dysfunction head-on and ensuring that the personnel system project remained on track and under control, it sought to take the easy way out and gave its contractor free rein. City of New York taxpayers are now paying the price: the unanticipated $300 million that this project consumed would pay the salaries and benefits of more than a few teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, and sanitation workers.

Government social media records

Local, state, and federal governments are increasingly using social media to convey important information and to solicit feedback from citizens. However, governments and officials are still struggling to adapt to a Web 2.0 world. Michigan, for example, is actually taking down some social media content as a result of legal considerations and resource limitations. U.S. Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have recently learned that citizen feedback isn't limited to "likes" or approval. At this moment, U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) is probably wishing that he had never gotten a Twitter account. And Kent County, Delaware has recently issued a policy that bars employees from posting negative comments about their colleagues or county government -- whether via county-owned computers while at work or via their own computers and cell phones while off the clock .

What to do? I can't help you strike the right balance between the need to present an appropriate face to the public and the free speech rights of your employees -- the courts will probably do that -- but if you're a government official or employee contemplating using social media, be sure to check out the following resources:

• Government Technology's Five Social Media Missteps to Avoid
• iDisaster 2.0's Top 36 Items to Include in Social Media Policies
• The Center for Technology in Government's Designing Social Media for Government: Eight Essential Elements, which contains links to a wide array of state and local government policies

Even a cursory glance at these resources will underscore the fact that, in most jurisdictions, social media content typically meets the statutory definition of a "public record" and must thus be managed properly. For tips on how to do so, consult the following:

• Patricia C. Franks's How Federal Agencies Can Effectively Manage Records Created Using New Social Media Tools
• The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's NARA Bulletin 2011-02, Guidance on Managing Records in Web 2.0/Social Media Platforms

At present, just about everyone seems to agree that most social media content has a short retention period. Unfortunately -- but not surprisingly -- there is no consensus regarding how best to capture and preserve content that has enduring value. There are lots of tools out there, and all of them have different features and save content differently. Given that most social media content will likely be destroyed within a relatively short timeframe, this isn't as big a problem as it might be. However, I suspect that those of us charged with capturing and preserving content deemed archival may run into some preservation problems a few years down the road -- and I hope that the federal government's 2009

My own experience is limited to capturing content created by others, which poses some additional challenges: some social media capture tools are expressly designed to help people preserve their own content and require full login rights. In such a situation, use of a Web crawler may be the best approach. I've experimented -- with decidedly mixed results -- with using OCLC's Heritrix-based Web Harvester to capture Facebook, IdeaScale, Twitter, and YouTube content, and I know several people have had somewhat greater success with Heritrix-based Archive-It service. If you're interested in exploring Web crawling of social media content, check out this nice list of Web crawling software and services.

If you're looking to preserve your own content, other options are available:

• Several low- and no-cost tools that support capture and archiving of one's own Facebook and Twitter content are out there. For more information, consult April Edmonds's superb overview.
• TwapperKeeper enables you to capture and preserve tweets (i.e., individual Twitter posts) that contain specified hashtags or keywords. Using this tool to capture all of the tweets created by a specific office may be a challenge, but it can be used to capture all of the tweets related to a specific subject or event. Sadly, the "download and export" and "API" components features present within the Web-based version of TwapperKeeper were recently removed at the behest of Twitter. However, it's still possible to install an open source version of the software that still includes these features on your own server.
  
• A growing number of software companies, among them Arkovi, Backupify, LiveOffice, Smarsh, Sonian, and Symantec, are creating social media archiving tools or incorporating them into larger e-mail archiving products. If you're already using an e-mail archiving product, investigate whether it also supports social media archiving. If you're not, a stand-alone commercial product or service may meet your needs.

Finally, please note that, at present, the imperative to manage state and local government social media records may conflict with the terms of service agreements governing usage of social media services such as Facebook or Twitter; in many instances, these agreements limit the extraction or repurposing of content. The federal government has negotiated special agreements with many social media service providers, and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers has negotiated a model Terms of Service agreement for state and local government Facebook users and is currently seeking to develop similar agreements with other social media service providers, but it's likely going to be some time before the legal issues that might affect our ability to manage social media records are resolved conclusively.

Ohio public records controversy

Apologies for the virtually non-existent posting during the past few weeks. I've spent three of the past four weeks attending to family matters, and I've simply had to put this blog and a bunch of other things on the back burner.

At the moment, I'm in Ohio, which is the site of a fascinating court case centering upon management of and access to public records. Ohio's Public Records Law currently allows citizens to receive civil forfeitures from local governments that have improperly destroyed requested records, and late last month the Ohio Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case involving Timothy Rhodes, who originally sought approximately $5 million in damages from the city of New Philadelphia, which destroyed audio recordings of roughly 20 years of 911 calls.

Rhodes initially submitted identical requests to several Ohio communities, all of which had destroyed their recordings. However, New Philadelphia was the only one that did not have an Ohio Historical Society-approved records schedule that gave it the legal right to destroy the recordings after they reached the end of their retention period.

New Philadelphia contends that Rhodes' multiple requests prove that he had no interest in the content of the records themselves and was seeking to exploit the Public Records Law for personal gain. Rhodes asserts that even though he did have a legitimate need for the information in the records -- he was involved in a group that opposed tax increases earmarked for countywide 911 services -- the Ohio Public Records Act states very plainly that records requesters do not need to explain why they want to see records or what they plan to do with the information the records contain.

A lower-court jury determined that Rhodes was seeking financial gain and ruled in favor of the city, an appeals court overturned the verdict on the grounds that Rhodes' motives were irrelevant, and now the matter is in the hands of the Supreme Court. Local governments throughout the state are eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court's ruling. Several other small cities are currently being sued by requesters seeking millions of dollars in civil penalties, and many, many others fear that a ruling in Rhodes' favor will lead to a deluge of requests from citizens seeking to turn bad records management practices into a source of personal income.

For what it's worth, I'm really of two minds about this case. I understand the fear of officials in New Philadelphia -- which is about an hour southeast of my current location -- and other localities about the ramifications of a ruling in Rhodes' favor. I don't have ready access to any statistics regarding open records requests, but my own experience and that of many colleagues at all levels of government suggest that public records requests are increasing in both volume and complexity. My experience also suggests that the local governments that would be most negatively affected by such a ruling are those that are least able to bear the burden: northern cities battered by decades of deindustrialization and southern small towns that struggled even when the rest of the state prospered and now compete to attract minimum-wage jobs.

At the same time, I believe that governments should take their records management responsibilities seriously, that citizens have the right to access public records, and that they shouldn't have to explain why they wish to access records. It's been a while since I've been in contact with anyone at the Ohio Historical Society, which serves as Ohio's state archives and records management agency, but it seems to me that the financial penalties outlined in the Public Records Act is a powerful inducement to get one's records management house in order; of course, one might ask whether the financial penalties for non-compliance might best be directed to a dedicated records management improvement fund or otherwise amended to reduce profiteering.

I have no idea when the Ohio Supreme Court will hand down its ruling, but I'm certainly looking forward to reading it.

"Newly found documents shed light on MLK's convicted killer"

Forged Canadian passport used by James Earl Ray, who was apprehended at Heathrow Airport in London on June 8, 1968 and extradited shortly afterward. Image courtesy of the Shelby County, Tennessee Register of Deeds.

I was perusing CNN's Web site this weekend, and the above headline jumped out at me; looking for records-related news is one of the occupational hazards of being an archivist and one of the chief avocational hazards of being an archivist blogger. I clicked the link, and my curiosity was amply rewarded.

Forty-three years ago today, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was slain in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was lending his support to striking sanitation workers. James Earl Ray was apprehended approximately two months after the shooting and ultimately entered a guilty plea in order to avoid undergoing a jury trial.

Until recently, little was known about Ray's state of mind in the months following his arrest or the inner workings of the investigations into King's murder. However, several years ago, staff from the Shelby County, Tennessee Register of Deeds who were processing unidentified materials in the Shelby County Archives found a large bundle of photographs, documents, and other materials relating to Ray, who later recanted his confession and unsuccessfully sought a jury trial.

All of these materials -- crime scene photographs, letters between Ray and members of his family, audio files, court records, and records of local, state, and federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies -- have been digitized and are now accessible via the Web site of the Shelby County Register of Deeds.

These records have a broader context that is reflected in the rich holdings of King Collection at Morehouse College, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Archive at Boston University, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University -- and in countless collections that document the lives and work of civil rights activists and white supremacists, slaveowners, abolitionists, and slaves, and countless other Americans of all races, ethnicities, religions, and social and political beliefs.

These materials nonetheless add significantly to our understanding of the environment in which Martin Luther King, Jr. lived and worked, our knowledge of the man who was convicted of murdering him, and our understanding of how the police and the courts dealt with a murder that had a profound and lasting impact upon American society. (And to think that people -- including those who really should know better -- sometimes assume local government records are dull or inconsequential!) Thanks to Shelby County Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood and his staff for devoting a lot of time, effort, and resources to making these important records widely available.

U.S. Federal Cloud Computing Strategy released

Last week, the Chief Information Officer of the United States released the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, which outlines how the federal government anticipates saving money, increasing the efficiency of its IT operations, and delivering better service to the public via cloud computing.

This strategy, which will help federal agencies migrate at least some of their IT infrastructure to commercial or government cloud environments, is intended to:

• Articulate the benefits, considerations, and trade-offs of cloud computing
• Provide a decision framework and case examples to support agencies in migrating towards cloud computing
• Highlight cloud computing implementation resources
• Identify Federal Government activities and roles and responsibilities for catalyzing cloud adoption (p. 2)
  

I haven't had the chance to give this document a close reading and likely won't have the chance to do so for a couple of weeks, but I have skimmed it and was pleased to note the following:

Storing information in the cloud will require a technical mechanism to achieve compliance with records management laws, policies and regulations promulgated by both the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the General Services Administration (GSA). The cloud solution has to support relevant record safeguards and retrieval functions, even in the context of a provider termination (p. 14) [emphasis added]

As a state government employee, I'm also intrigued by this statement:

Federal Government contracts will also provide riders for state and local governments. These riders will allow all of these governments to realize the same procurement advantages of the Federal Government. Increasing membership in cloud services will further drive innovation and cost efficiency by increasing market size and creating larger efficiencies-of-scale (p. 29) [emphasis added].

And this one:

To effectively manage these governance issues in the long-term, the Federal Government needs to lay a stable governance foundation that will outlast single individuals or administrations. To the best extent possible, individuals or committees should have explicitly defined roles, non-overlapping responsibilities, and a clear decision-making hierarchy. These steps will empower the government for action, minimize unnecessary bureaucracy, and ensure accountability for results.

The following bodies will therefore have these roles and responsibilities:

• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will lead and collaborate with Federal, State, and local government agency CIOs, private sector experts, and international bodies to identify and prioritize cloud computing standards and guidance . . . . (p. 31) [emphasis added]

I'm looking forward to seeing how all of this plays out.

The infopocalypse is upon us

Last week, the Boston Phoenix published an article by Chris Faraone highlighting how local, state, and federal governments are struggling to manage ever-increasing amounts of digital data. Provocatively titled "Infopocalypse: The Cost of Too Much Data," Faraone notes that:

The United States Census Bureau alone maintains about 2560 terabytes of information -- more data than is contained in all the academic libraries in America, and the equivalent of about 50 million four-drawer filing cabinets of documents.

Other federal agencies have similarly mind-boggling quantities of data, and state and local governments are also amassing vast stores of digital information.

Not surprisingly, "public data remains, by and large, a disorganized mess." Governments don't know precisely what they have or how to make best use of it, and old, paper-centered ways of responding to freedom of information requests and performing other essential functions persist.

Why does this situation exist? In my humble opinion, Faraone has nailed the root causes:

There is too much data. Digital storage is not a natural resource. The amount of information that government agencies may be required to keep — from tweets and e-mails to tax histories — is growing faster than the capacity for storage.

There's not enough manpower to manage all this data. The Obama administration hopes to make more information freely available online. But in the meantime, the old method of requesting data from the government -- filing a FOIA request -- is bogged down due to an insufficient workforce and long request backlogs.

Private companies are storing public data. This trend in outsourcing, largely the result of too much data and too little manpower, is a potential threat to both access and security, as resources that belong to the people are entrusted to outside vendors, raising new privacy concerns.

What to do about this situation? As Faraone notes, the data center consolidation strategy being pushed by Vivek Kundra, the Chief Information Officer of the United States, may help, but it's only a start. Faraone also suggests -- correctly -- that hiring additional staff who can process freedom of information requests and making readily available online data that doesn't contain legally restricted or, in the federal environment, classified information would also improve things a bit.

However, none of these things will solve the problem, which, as Sunlight Foundation policy director John Wunderlich pointed out to Faraone, is in many ways akin to that posed by the explosive growth of paper government records during the first two-thirds of the 20th century:

"Back then [government agencies] didn't know what to throw out, what to standardize, or how to organize. The challenges we face in data are in similar scope -- that's why it's so important that these issues are addressed head-on before it's too late."

Surprisingly, Faraone makes no mention of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which works with agencies to figure out how to standardize and organize their records and how and when to dispose of records that have reached the end of their useful life, or of the role that agency records managers have -- or, as is all too often the case, should have -- in ensuring that all agency records are properly managed. Hiring some records management personnel -- at NARA, the 50 state archives, larger local governments, and larger government agencies -- would no doubt help to reduce agency storage pressures.

However, the more I work with electronic records, the less convinced I am that simply hiring a few more records managers will make everything better. We forget sometimes that formalized records management theory and practice are not mere outgrowths of common sense. They were practical responses to the challenges posed by the deluge of paper records created by ever-larger and ever more complex organizations. The infopocalypse that we face is in some respects quite similar to that which confronted our mid-20th century predecessors, but it is also, at least in some respects, unique. Addressing the challenges associated with our infopocalypse successfully will likely mean a shift in thinking no less monumental than that which propelled the rise of records management as a discipline and More Product, Less Process archival processing.

What will this shift in thinking look like? I don't know. I anticipate I that we're going to focus less on one-on-one guidance and more on standards development and automation of tasks now performed by humans. I also expect that our definitions of "record" and "records series" will be altered significantly and I suspect that, at some point in the future, be discarded altogether.

Yeah, I'm scared, too. However, our mid-20th century predecessors were as shaken by the changes in their record-keeping environment as we are by the changes in ours. They chose to meet those challenges head-on, and, after a lot of hard work and mistakes along the way, eventually developed workable solutions to complex problems. If we have any interest in surviving -- which may well mean evolving from "archivists" and "records managers" into "digital preservationists" or "data curators" or somesuch -- we'll take our lumps and do the same.

Documenting Leadership: media and records

One of the benefits of blogging is its real-time nature: stuff happens, and posts follow almost almost immediately afterward. One of the drawbacks of blogging its its real-time nature: a lone blogger can only do so much. At the end of an intense week, I “desymposed” by watching part of the first season of The X Files on DVD and playing Google’s Pac Man game, the disappearance of which is both an annoyance and a relief. As a result, I’m running behind. However, I hope that this post and its successors will be better for having been written by someone took some time to reflect on what transpired.

One of the most entertaining sessions at the Documenting Leadership symposium centered upon journalists’ use of government records. The panelists were sharp, funny, and expressed a range of perspectives. A number of themes came to the fore:

A reporter’s background knowledge is indispensable. Mickey Carroll (Quinnipiac University Polling Institute) emphasized that most reporters don’t have time to sift through records. They do broad reading, cultivate reliable sources, and draw upon their knowledge of the players and their context-- which takes young reporters a long time to develop -- in order to make sense of the tidbits of information they find.

Rex Smith, Ethan Riegelhaupt, and Mickey Carroll

Records are the lifeblood of investigative journalism. Sandra Peddie (Newsday) asserted that as investigative reporter, she has both the time to file freedom of information requests and the obligation to “get things right.” Government records were at the coreof her exposes of state pension system abuses and the inner workings of some of Long Island’s “special districts,” and she’s currently fighting to obtain records documenting the inner workings of the office of Suffolk County Executive (and gubernatorial candidate) Steve Levy. Ethan Riegelhaupt (New York Times), whose employer has the resources needed to sustain in-depth investigative journalism and mine government databases, concurred, as did Peter Elkind (Fortune), whose biography of Eliot Spitzer relies heavily upon records that illuminated the complexities of his subject’s political decisions and motives.

The needs of government and the press sometimes conflict. Riegelhaupt noted that as former government counsel, he understood that officials need space to determine policy and that closed-door meetings are sometimes necessary; as a newspaper attorney, he also recognized the need for access to information. However, Elkind stressed that although we seem to have reached a point where day-to-day, intense coverage of politics has gotten in the way of getting things done, officials are responsible for running the government and reporters are responsible for unearthing and disseminating information about government.

Proactive disclosure is a good thing. Noting that President Obama has directed federal agencies to disclose federal records in anticipation of receipt of freedom of information requests, Mark Mahoney (Glens Falls Post-Star) asserted that he wanted to see state and local government do the same. Moderator Rex Smith (Albany Times-Union) also endorsed this practice, which may sometimes displease journalists: the city of Chicago has just started posting summary information about all of the freedom of information requests it receives, and as a result the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times can no longer hide their probes from one another.

Peter Elkind, Mark Mahoney, and Sandra Peddie

Freedom of information laws aren’t perfect. Elkind was stunned to discover that the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) permitted the withholding of records that, in his view, should have been disclosed and that the law doesn’t cover legislative records. Caroll noted that the law itself may have had an inhibiting effect: prior to FOIL’s enactment in the 1970s, many government officials were actually more willing to share records with reporters than they are now.

Journalists are still trying come to terms with the new information ecosystem. Riegelhaupt noted that everyone is still grappling with the implications of having ready access to vast quantities of information and to the perspectives not only of officials and reporters but also of millions of other people. Mahoney noted that in this environment, engaging readers on a personal level -- via blogs such as his (highly recommended) Your Right to Know -- is essential. Riegelhaupt emphasized that the changes are going to be even more profound: newspapers and other media outlets can now publish the texts of officials’ speeches, copies of government databases, and large quantities of other government records. As a result, their Web sites will both serve as the first draft of history. Peddie noted that when newspapers put electronic government records on their Web sites, these sites become important public access points. As a government archivist, I have concerns about ceding this role to the media, but I also understand that the media also has an interest in providing authentic information and that most people will view media sites as sufficiently trustworthy.

Archivists must also come to grips with this new ecosystem. Smith and Riegelhaupt mentioned in passing that archivists are going to have to grapple with whether and how to preserve Web sites, blogs, and other new information resources. As New York State Archivist Chris Ward pointed out, the New York State Archives is working on it -- and so is the profession as a whole. Not surprisingly, journalists also want faster, easier access to the records that archivists have. Mahoney stressed that reporters really appreciate ready access to digitized records: they’re a big help to people who have tight deadlines, and they enable readers to evaluate the quality of reporting. We’re working on that, too -- even if scarce resources force us to move slowly than anyone would like.

Documenting Leadership: keynote and first session

Today was the first day of Documenting Leadership: A Symposium on Public Executive Records in the 21st Century. About 100 journalists, current and former public officials, policy researchers, archivists, and records managers were present, and more will be coming tomorrow.

I’ve had a very long day -- it began at 8:00 AM and ended at 8:30 PM, and the festivities begin again tomorrow at 8:00 AM -- so this post is going to focus on today’s keynote address and the first panel discussion. I’ll be playing catch-up tomorrow and over the weekend.

Richard Norton Smith

Richard Norton Smith, who has written biographies of several presidents and New York governors Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey and who is currently working on a biography of Nelson Rockefeller, got the day off to a great start: Noting that 16 U.S. Presidents have had gubernatorial experience, he asserted that the fact that 4 of these presidents came from New York really shouldn’t be surprising: New York’s governors have reformed the civil service, altered industrial and labor practices, spearheaded mammoth public work projects, oversaw the development of an effective public health system, championed civil rights, and fought water and air pollution. For decades, New York functioned as the laboratory for federal reform.

He then discussed how his research has led him to value both archival records, which shed unique light on the personal qualities of executive leaders and the nuances of their thoughts and deeds, and oral histories, which may be flawed but help to fill in the gaps in the documentary record. I was particularly struck by his assertions concerning executive leaders’ attitudes toward their records: in his experience, presidents think they did a pretty good job, and they don’t lie awake trying to figure out how to cover up their mistakes or misdeeds. However, they do lie awake thinking of how to prove the Washington Post and the New York Times wrong. Noting that history is always more generous than headline writers, he expressed the hope that New York’s governors would eventually recognize that history is not a continuation of the New York Post.

Robert Ward and Robert Sink

Some of the themes that Smith touched upon returned during the first panel discussion of the day, “Public Policy and the Public Interest.” Robert Ward (Rockefeller Institute of Government) highlighted several factors that may help to account for the divergence between federal and New York State laws governing executive records: declining gubernatorial and legislative interest in tackling the large-scale issues that commanded the attention of the state’s governors for much of the 20th century, the “broad degrading” of political discourse, the State Legislature’s efforts to limit executive power, and growing disbelief in the value of public institutions. Moderator Rex Smith (Albany Times-Union) noted that the relatively new but widely held belief that government is inherently ineffective has also contributed to the situation.

Rex Smith and Ned Regan

Former State Comptroller Ned Regan (Baruch College, CUNY), who transferred his official records to the State Archives when he left office and periodically consults them, asserted that New York’s political circumstances may also be to blame. New York is a “strong governor” state, and its current “three men in a room” approach to politics -- only the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the Assembly speaker wield any real power -- emerged because it’s the only way that the legislative branch can stand up to the executive. However, this system breeds legislative dysfunction, and the fate of executive records is one of many important matters that legislators have not addressed. Robert Ward, who asserted that the “three men in a room” phenomenon is rooted in legislators’ self interest and their constituents’ failure to hold them to account, agreed that legislative dysfunction helps to account for the state’s failure to modernize laws relating to executive records.

Gerald Benjamin (SUNY New Paltz), who will participate in one of tomorrow’s panels, offered an interesting comment from the floor: unlike Smith, whose work centers upon people who have been out office for some time, he’s found that executives dealing with the day-to-day grind of politics often have a short-term interest in tampering with the historical record. Moreover, New York is facing an even more unsettling problem: loss of institutional capacity to deal with records. Responding in part to this comment, Ned Regan offered an incisive observation: “systems are more important than competence.” Indeed: while at the reception, a colleague and I concluded it’s better for an organization to have a long-lived, workaday records management program than to have a records management dynamo whose influence fades after his or her departure.

In retrospect, I’m kind of surprised that none of the panelists devoted much attention to Watergate. I’ve always suspected that one of the reasons that New York lacks a strong executive records law is that, to date, it hasn’t had a governor who has abused the powers of the office as egregiously as Richard Nixon abused those of the presidency. However, all of the other factors identified by the panelists -- the narrowed focus of gubernatorial and legislative effort, the strident tone of current political discourse, cynicism about government, and legislative dysfunction -- are certainly in play.

Robert Sink (formerly of the New York Public Library) highlighted how the problems identified by the other panelists fed a scandal centering upon municipal executive records. New York City had a weak public records law and a weak archival program and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who was intent upon reorganizing city government and had a “defiant attitude” toward the concept of freedom of information, slashed funding for the Department of Records and Information Services (DORIS), appointed a commissioner who had no archival or records management experience, and sought to rob it of its independence.

As Mayor Giuliani was preparing to leave office, he asserted that DORIS, which lost half of its staff as a result of budget cuts that he himself had made, couldn’t properly care for his records. He wanted to transfer them to a non-profit organization that bore his name, allow the organization to limit access to certain materials, and engage an archival consulting firm to process them; it soon came to light that he had offered his records to several non-governmental repositories, all of which turned him down.

These actions prompted a public outcry, and the records were returned to DORIS after processing. However, the city has not substantially increased support for DORIS, and its public records law, while strengthened, is still relatively weak. Moreover, even though a reputable archival consulting firm processed the records, the possibility remains that the records were “cleansed” while they were outside public control. If New York City had a strong public records law and a strong government archival program that was insulated from political pressure, the integrity of the records wouldn’t be subject to question.

A lively discussion of the merits of preserving public records in public archives ensued. Bob Sink noted that if a gubernatorial administration works with state archives staff to manage the transfer of records, the records’ chain of custody will be firmly established. Moreover, New York’s state archivist is not a political appointee, and the State Archives itself is not directly controlled by the governor. Archivists in the audience pointed out that state archives are repositories of other government records and knowledge of the workings of state government and that, unlike some private repositories that mandate that the archivists who process a politician’s records share that politician’s political views, they do not factor political beliefs into their hiring decisions.

All in all, a great start. More tomorrow . . . .

Reminder: Executive Records Symposium, Albany, New York, May 20-21

The New York State Capitol, as seen from the Empire State Plaza, 24 November 2008.

If you have a personal or professional interest in ensuring that the official records of presidents, governors, attorneys general, mayors, and other elected executives are preserved and made accessible, you might want to come to Albany, New York on 20-21 May -- and make arrangements to do so by 17 May.

The records of elected executives document important policy and resource allocation decisions. However, in New York and many other states, the records of elected executives are not always transferred to the state archives or to other repositories. The gaps in New York State laws concerning the disposition of gubernatorial records have gotten some media attention lately, but other states, local governments, and the federal government face similar problems. Moreover, many executive records are now created or maintained in electronic systems; as a result, the days of acquiring executive records via dumpster diving or negotiation with an executive's heirs are pretty much over.

On 20-21 May 2010, the New York State Archives Partnership Trust and the Albany Law School’s Government Law Center will join forces to highlight the need for effective executive recordkeeping at all. Documenting Leadership: A Symposium on Public Executive Records in the 21st Century will explore the importance of preserving the records generated by governors and other elected public executives, including presidents, attorneys general, and mayors.

Former U.S. Attorney General and Governor of Pennsylvania Richard Thornburgh will deliver the symposium's keynote address, "The Legacy of an Executive: A Governor’s Perspective," and nationally recognized Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith will deliver an address entitled "Telling the Executive Story: The Thrill of the Chase."

In addition, attorneys, journalists, and past and current government officials will take part in panel discussions focusing on:

• Public Policy and the Public Interest
• Transparency, Executive Records, and the Media
• Executive Records: Access and Disclosure
• Access in the Digital Age
• Executive Records as Legacy

This event, which will be held at Albany Law School, is free and open to the public and will include a May 20th reception at the Governor's Mansion. However, attendees must register by May 17. Click here for online registration, detailed location information, and the full program.

Executive records symposium, Albany, New York, 20-21 May 2010

Do you have a personal or professional interest in ensuring that the official records of presidents, governors, attorneys general, mayors, and other elected executives receive the proper care? If so, you might want to come to Albany, New York on 20-21 May.

The records of elected executives document important policy and resource allocation decisions, and in many instances are essential to the study of state history and state government. However, in New York and many other states, the records of elected executives are not always transferred to the state archives or to other repositories. Moreover, most of these records are now created or maintained in electronic systems and are thus at risk of being rendered inaccessible by changes in technology or lost as a result of human error, decay of storage media, or equipment failure.

On 20-21 May 2010, the New York State Archives Partnership Trust and the Albany Law School’s Government Law Center will join forces to highlight the need for effective executive recordkeeping at all. Documenting Leadership: A Symposium on Public Executive Records in the 21^st Century will explore the importance of the records generated by governors and other elected public executives, including presidents, attorneys general, and mayors.

Richard Thornburgh, the former Governor of Pennsylvania (1979-1987) and U.S. Attorney General (1988-1991), and Richard Norton Smith, the nationally recognized Presidential historian, will deliver keynote addresses.

In addition, panelists drawn from the ranks of government, the news media, historians, public policy researchers, and the legal community will discuss the issues associated with managing, preserving, and accessing records of elected public officials who have executive responsibilities:

• The importance of executive-level records for the administration of government and implementation of public policy, and, at an administration’s end, for the historical record
  
• The special challenges of protecting sensitive information while assuring government transparency and accountability
  
• Best practices and model programs in other states and at the federal level
• Elements of model legislation

And to top it all off, on the evening of 20 May a reception for speakers and attendees will be held at the New York State Executive Mansion (reservation absolutely, positively required!)

For more details about Documenting Leadership symposium, which will be held in the Dean Alexander Moot Court Room of Albany Law School's 1928 Building, check out the online program. Please note that although this event is free and open to the public, advance registration for both the symposium and the reception is required.

Save the Date: Open Government Summit, Albany, New York, 19 March 2010

The New York State Office of the Chief Information Officer/Office for Technology and the New York State Archives are hosting an:

OPEN GOVERNMENT SUMMIT
EMPIRE STATE PLAZA, ALBANY, NY
March 19, 2010
9 AM - 5 PM

This one day summit will feature keynote speakers, panel discussions and a reception addressing “hot-button” issues in the "open government" dialogue including:

• The meaning of “open government” in the digital age
• Operationalizing digital openness
• Meeting citizen expectations for access
• What the future holds for openness
• Best practices
• Sunshine Law and archival implications of digital records

This summit is designed to bring government officials, technologists, archivists, and open government advocates together with speakers from across the country to discuss the issue of open government in the digital era.

Detailed program and location information will be available shortly -- and I can promise you that the roster of speakers will be impressive!

SAA 2009: Government Records Section meeting

Austin's Congress Street Bridge, which spans Lady Bird Lake, is home to the nation's largest urban bat colony. During the summer months, up to 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats live in the crevices under the bridge. At dusk, the bats fly out in waves and search for food; each night, they eat between 10,000-20,000 pounds of insects.

After a brief business meeting, SAA members who attended the Government Records Section got to hear two great speakers address freedom of information issues at the state federal and local level.

David Mengel of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Special Access/FOIA Staff unit, which handles Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests concerning archival materials created by executive branch agencies, discussed recent changes in the federal government’s handling of FOIA requests and recent trends affecting the National Archives.

Immediately after taking office, President Obama issued statements pledging his commitment to transparency, openness, and collaboration within government and instructing agencies that records should be reviewed with a presumption of openness. Shortly afterward, the U.S. Attorney General issued a memo instructing agencies to review FOIA requests with a presumption of openness and issued comprehensive guidelines relating to each FOIA exemption.

Mengel emphasized that these developments constitute a significant shift in the federal government’s commitment to openness. However, this shift also complicates NARA’s work in ways that ought to be increasingly familiar to other government archivists:

• NARA gets a lot of FOIA requests for open records, in part because people don’t know that records are open and in part because they want NARA to do their research for them. The volume of requests covering very large quantities of records is steadily increasing.

• NARA is also trying to figure out how to review large quantities of e-mail and other electronic textual documents. For example, it has yet to find any workable search strategy for locating Social Security Numbers within State Department cables, which have been kept electronically since 1973. NARA ended up sampling the records and discovered that SSNs were typically bundled with dates and places of birth; however, the abbreviations associated with these elements of information have changed over time.

• Federal agencies are running out of storage space, so NARA is getting records that are more recent -- and thus have more privacy issues and other problems (e.g., proprietary information) than older records. It doesn’t help that agencies don’t always identify these issues prior to transfer. In an effort to [identify problems,] Mengel’s unit is trying to get more involved in the appraisal process and looking at records as they come in. However, NARA’s need to review newer records may lead the public to conclude that it’s hiding information.

Mengel concluded by noting that although his unit is trying to improve its handling of FOIA requests, it’s being overwhelmed; there simply aren’t enough people to do the work. Moreover, future developments that NARA views as positive will likely bring new challenges: it looks as if President will soon establish a National Declassification Center under the supervision of the Archivist of the United States, and NARA’s workload may increase dramatically as a result.

Sean Malone, the Records Service Manager of Travis County, Texas, then discussed openness and transparency issues from a local government perspective. He emphasized that in some respects, the situation in Texas is better than that at the federal level: Texas has a strong tradition of openness and transparency, and the Attorney General determines statewide procedures for reviewing and disclosing records. However, local governments in Texas face persistent and worsening fiscal constraints; when times are bad, it’s especially hard to make the case for spending money on records and archives instead of aid to needy families or other essential services.

Malone also highlighted two records issues that pose particular problems for him and for other records managers:

• Resolving conflicts between employees’ First Amendment rights and the public’s right to access government information. Information created on BlackBerries, etc., is a particular problem: people are deeply resistant to the idea that the personal e-mails and text messages on their employer-supplied devices are public records and that work files on their home computers must be turned over.

• The need for better ways to search electronic records and identify materials requested by researchers. Unfortunately, the technology is not forthcoming. For example, Novell’s GroupWise e-mail application, which the county uses, does not have the market share needed to spur development of good e-mail management solutions. Managing e-mail is thus a real problem for the county, and there is a real tension between what the state says it should be doing and what it can do given its fiscal situation.

Malone closed by discussing e-mail issues at the state government level: Governor Rick Perry has ordered that his staff’s e-mail be purged after seven days, and staffers are responsible for printing out records that have longer retention periods. Owing to the sheer volume of e-mail that users receive and the complexity of the state’s records schedules, gubernatorial staffers automatically forward all messages to their personal accounts so that they can retrieve it later if necessary. However, happens to this e-mail when people no longer work for the state?

Great presenters, great presentations, lots to think about.

Government e-records

On the eve of the 4th, here are a couple of examples of the heady new opportunities and horrific challenges that governments face in the digital era:

• The City of New York's NYC Big Apps contest exemplifies how a little creative thinking can make government more open and enhance citizen access to government information. The city is inviting software developers to create applications that enhance access to and use of one or more of roughly 80 datasets created by 32 city agencies and commissions. Officials are still determining which datasets will be released -- and are soliciting public comment -- but some possibilities include restaurant inspection data, recreational facility directories, and citywide event schedules. The developers who produce the applications most useful to New Yorkers will get a cash prize, dinner with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and opportunities to market their work.

• On the other hand, the plight of Alaska illustrates just how damaging deficiencies in government records systems and recordkeeping practices can be, particularly in an era of hiring freezes and scant funds for upgrades. Alaska officials have announced that, to date, they have devoted over 4,000 hours of staff time (roughly $450,000 in salaries) to attempting to fulfill freedom of information requests for e-mails sent or received by Governor Sarah Palin, who a few hours ago announced her intention to resign from office on 26 July. This unenviable situation is what happens when an unprecedented number of sweeping requests intersects with an electronic recordkeeping system that doesn't facilitate electronic search, retrieval, and disclosure of e-mail.
  

Stonewall riot police reports available online

This month, OutHistory.org features a new online exhibit that was made possible by the New York State Freedom of Information Law (FOIL).

The Stonewall riots, a series of spontaneous demonstrations that erupted after police raided a Greenwich Village gay bar and became the founding symbol of the modern gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights movement, erupted during the wee hours of 28 June 1969. In honor of the fortieth anniversary of this event, Jonathan Ned Katz, the pioneering scholar of LGBT history, has created an online exhibit that features digital images and transcriptions of nine New York City Police Department (NYPD) records documenting the protests.

With the assistance of historian David Carter, Katz obtained copies of seven of the documents by submitting a FOIL request to the NYPD in May 2009. When responding to his request, the NYPD opted not to redact the names of the people who were arrested in connection with the Stonewall riots. As Katz notes, these records identify protesters and police officers whose involvement has not been documented in other sources and suggest avenues for further research.

They also highlight how the NYPD's attitudes have changed as time has passed (or, perhaps, because time has passed): the other two documents at the center of the exhibit were released in 1988 to another researcher who filed a FOIL request (and ultimately sued the NYPD), and at that time, the NYPD blacked out the names of arrestees.

Although I visit OutHistory.org from time to time, I learned about the addition of these records to the site via a New York Times City Room blog post highlighting the new exhibit. This post also includes a brief interview with David Carter, whose 2004 account of Stonewall and its immediate aftermath is widely regarded as definitive.

NYS e-records symposium available online

Last year, the New York State Archives co-sponsored a series of electronic records symposia that highlighted how local governments and state agencies were addressing various electronic records issues. I was able to attend and blog about one symposium, Taming the Wild Frontier: EDMS Implementations for State and Local Government, but my synopsis really didn't do the sessions justice. Happily, these sessions were taped, and anyone who has Flash Video Player installed on his or her computer can view the slides and listen to the speakers via the State Archives' Web site; closed captioning is available.

These presentations have actually been on up on the State Archives site for quite some time, but I somehow managed to overlook them -- which is deeply embarrassing given that there's a prominent link to them on the home page! However, these presentations are so good that I'm willing to look a bit foolish in order to trumpet their existence. If you're interested in electronic document management systems, electronic records management, or recordkeeping in state and local government environments, by all means check them out.

Unalaska police report

Unalaska is a fishing community of approximately 4,000 situated on one of the Aleutian islands. It's not a glamorous place, and it doesn't attract celebrities or socialites. However, thanks to the records of its police department, it's better known than it would be otherwise. Owing largely to Sgt. Jennifer Shockley's dry wit and keen sense of the absurd, the department's weekly report has become a favorite of bloggers in Alaska and beyond.

As the following excerpts from the current report illustrate, the reports provide a snapshot of life in a small town and the activities of its first responders.

12/29/08 Mon 1202 Assault – Complainant reported he had been threatened and assaulted several times by a man to whom he owes a substantial amount of money for cocaine. The caller simply wished for police to be aware of the situation.

12/29/08 Mon 1948 Disorderly Conduct – Dispatch received a report of a fight at a local processing facility. When officers arrived, they contacted seven men, none of whom indicated there had been any fighting, only good-natured birthday fun.

12/31/08 Wed 1320 MVA-Damage – An intoxicated driver fled after he lost control of his vehicle and struck a parked car. An officer located the suspect driver, N.T.*, a short while later. T., 25 yoa, of Washington, was arrested for Driving under the Influence, Reckless Driving, Failure to Report an Accident and Failure to Show Proof of Insurance.

12/31/08 Wed 1732 Drug Law Violation – An anonymous caller provided information about illegal drugs on board a local fishing vessel. Officers seized the vessel and secured a search warrant after finding some paraphernalia on the boat. N.T.* [the same guy who was arrested for DUI earlier that day!] and K.W.*, 45 yoa, of Sitka, were both arrested on charges of Misconduct Involving a Controlled Substance IV when additional drugs and paraphernalia were found in their staterooms.

01/01/09 Thu 1520 Traffic Roads – A manhole cover refused to continue covering its hole, even after being replaced repeatedly.

01/02/09 Fri 1018 Suspicious Person/Activity – Caller reported a driver traveling in the wrong lane of traffic. An officer located the suspect driver, who was not intoxicated and admitted he had been traveling near the center of the roadway. The officer cautioned him not to take his half of the road out of the middle in the future.

From an archivist's or records manager's point of view, one of the most interesting things about the weekly Unalaska police report is the set of circumstances that led the department to start issuing it. According to the local paper, the Dutch Harbor Fisherman:

Sgt. Matt Betzen said that it began after the department switched to an electronic records management system, and the director at the time couldn’t use the system. The staff began summarizing their calls and incident reports into one report so that he would know what was going on, then started releasing the reports to the public.

Of course, from a strict records management perspective, an administrator's lack of computer savvy is not a good reason to begin creating a new series of records. However, as Sgt. Shockley points out in an e-mail interview, the department has discovered that the weekly report has real value:

In the most basic sense, it’s a PR tool. It lets the public know that we do actually have calls for service, no matter how inane and trivial they might seem, year-round. Not that anyone has actually suggested this, but I get the sense that some people believe a police department is largely unnecessary here. People sometimes assume that because Unalaska is a fairly small community, there must not be much work for a police officer to do.

There are admittedly a few weeks each year where we don’t get many reports about crime per se, but we’re still asked to perform quite a few public services, whether it’s unlocking a car, checking smoke alarms or collecting dead animals off the road. During the busy seasons, we’re dealing with quite a bit of what most people would consider “typical” crime – assaults, domestic violence, thefts, etc. The press release lets the public know what kind of crime we have here and, I hope, keeps the public aware that the public safety department is a necessary part of the community.

Sadly, the Unalaska Advertiser, which doesn't provide access to older reports, sees to be the only online source for the Unalaska weekly police report. However, its easy to bookmark the Police Beat page and to copy and save particularly interesting entries or sets of entries.

I always tell people that government records can be and often are a lot more interesting than they expect, but this is the first time that I've added a local government records series to my weekly must-read list. And I'm sure that there are other treasures out there . . . .

*Although the full names of arrested individuals appear in the police reports posted on the Unalaska Advertiser site, I've opted to include only their initials. The police report is a public record and information within it can be disseminated widely, but the online version of the 4 January 2009 report will be taken down when the 11 January report is posted. This blog post will remain online and searchable long afterward, and the individuals in question are private people who haven't yet had their day in court. I see no point in including their full names in this post.