The demise of Trinity Episcopal Church, Albany, New York

The now-demolished Trinity Episcopal Church as seen from Trinity Place, Albany, New York, 12 August 2011, 7:58 PM.

This post is the first in a series focusing on the history and built environment of Albany, New York and the Hudson River Valley.

It is not the post I planned to write.

As you all know, this blog focuses on electronic records and other archival matters. However, it's also a (partial) record of the interests and preoccupations of one electronic records archivist, and I thought it would be nice to put together a summer 2011 series of posts focusing on the distinctive architecture and history of my little corner of the world. The Hudson River Valley and New York's capital city are home to some fascinating things. Some, such as Crailo State Historic Site, testify to the enduring influence of Dutch culture in the former colony of New Netherland. Others, such as a temporary installation of kinetic sculptures by George Rickey, are more modern and more fleeting. I thought that you might like to learn a bit about these things -- and I knew that I would enjoy carving out some time to visit, photograph, and write about them.

Unfortunately, this inaugural post highlights failure and loss.

On the morning of Tuesday, 12 August 2011, one of the exterior walls of Albany's Trinity Episcopal Church collapsed and the City of Albany had to demolish the entire structure. The church was designed by James Renwick, Jr.,who also designed the Smithsonian Institution Building and the Corcoran Gallery of Art building in Washington, DC, St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, the Main Building of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, and many other noteworthy structures. Most cities would be proud to have a Renwick building, but Trinity Episcopal Church had languished in disuse for several decades. Albany County put the building up for auction last fall, and a New York City woman purchased it for $500.00.

I visited the site on 12, 13, and 14 July and took some photos and videos that document the demise of this neglected landmark and the efforts of demolition firm Ditonno and Sons to salvage the church's stained glass windows, which may have been the work of Renwick's friend Louis Comfort Tiffany, and wooden architectural elements.

On 12 July, a pedestrian strolling past Trinity Place on Westerlo Street or Madison Avenue might have thought that the church was disused but structurally sound.

However, anyone who turned onto Trinity Place would quickly see that something was very, very wrong. By the evening of 12 July, the back half of the building had been demolished. Piles of rubble filled the gap between the church and the headquarters of the Trinity Alliance, a venerable social services organization once affiliated with the church. Pieces of plywood were set against the glass doors and windows of the Trinity Alliance building to protect them from flying bricks.

If by chance an observer failed to notice the plywood and rubble, one glimpse at the church's open front door would have revealed that only the front half of the church was still standing and that a backhoe was sitting atop the rubble in back. ( If you're curious as to what Trinity Episcopal's interior looked like, fellow Albany blogger Chuck Miller took some stunning pictures on 13 July.)

The mood at the scene was strangely buoyant. Many people were stopping by and taking photos and reminiscing about the church; I spoke with one 80 year-old woman who had gone to dances at Trinity as a teenager. Neighborhood residents, who were ordered to leave their homes for the duration of the demolition, filed in and out to pick up changes of clothing and other necessities and to lament the loss of a local landmark. Everyone was nonetheless relieved that no one had been injured or killed as a result of the collapse and that none of the adjoining buildings had been compromised; every now and then, the unanticipated collapse of a vacant Albany building does irreparable damage to a well-maintained and occupied neighboring structure.

I was contemplating all of the things that could have gone wrong but didn't when a flash of movement caught my eye. As Ditonno and Sons was winding down its work for the evening, a gray cat ran over to the southern side of the building and meowed loudly. A black kitten emerged from the grass beside the southern bell tower. The duo moved slowly --the kitten was exhausted and terrified -- to the northern side of the church, where they paused to rest for a while. I called out to the mother cat in an effort to coax the pair away from the building, but she didn't trust me -- the neighborhood is home to a large feral cat population -- and her kitten simply didn't want to move. I looked for them on 13 and 14 July, but didn't see them. I hope they found sanctuary elsewhere.

I returned to the site on the evening of 13 July, by which time Ditonno and Sons had demolished the church's bell towers.

Owing to concerns about the structural integrity of the church -- a fire fighter at the scene told me that one of the side walls had started swaying ominously earlier that day -- Ditonno and Sons workers used sledgehammers to tear down the towers.

If you look closely at the remnants of the southern bell tower above, you can see just how badly the mortar holding together the bricks had deteriorated.

Bricks rained down onto the steps below the towers.

I stopped by the site immediately after work on 14 July to find that only part of the northern bell tower remained. As they had done throughout the demolition, Ditonno and Sons workers hosed down the rubble in an effort to keep down the dust.


They were also preparing to salvage the remaining stained glass windows. As noted above, Ditonno and Sons tried to save as many of the windows and wooden architectural elements as they could.

A fire fighter at the scene told me that the demolition of Trinity Episcopal Church marked the first time that a City of Albany demolition project had such a large-scale salvaging component, and he went on to say that, in his view, Ditonno and Sons "deserve a medal" for doing such great work. Having seen and filmed Ditonno and Sons remove the bricks and mortar surrounding the windows in the northern bell tower, I agree. I've never seen a backhoe operated with such precision and delicacy.

Apologies for the jumpiness of this footage -- despite the constant hosing down, dust was flying everywhere, and it got into my eyes a couple of times.


After the crew removed most of the brick and mortar surrounding a given window, a Ditonno and Sons worker (most likely one of the Ditonno sons) in a cherry picker tied the window, which had been sandwiched between sheets of plywood, to the work platform. He then pulled the window free of the building and carefully lowered it to the ground.

Owing to the church's poor condition, Ditonno and Sons wasn't able to save all of the windows. The fire fighter I spoke with on 12 July indicated that one window had been lost earlier that day, and a few minutes after I shot the footage above, part of the northern bell tower collapsed and the one remaining window fell to the ground. Owing to its plywood encasement and the relatively short distance it fell, it may be possible to repair this window, but I wouldn't bet on it.

At present, no one knows what will happen to these windows or to the other architectural elements that were salvaged. According to the Albany Times-Union, Ditonno and Sons, which per its contract with the City of Albany is entitled to keep materials salvaged from demolition sites, may be their legal owner. However, if the windows are extremely valuable, the City of Albany may be able to lay claim to them. And, of course, Trinity Episcopal Church's owner, who now owes the city almost $150,000 in demolition costs, may have a claim to them; however, she never listed the building on the City of Albany's vacant building registry, which was a condition of sale. For now, the windows and other materials will be placed in storage until experts can identify their creator and determine their cash value.

I left the site at shortly 7:00 PM on 14 July. By that time, Trinity Episcopal Church was little more than a pile of rubble. The iron railing at center right marks the approximate location of the church's front door.

A fragment of the southern bell tower remained standing, but it wasn't demolished until the following morning. Ditonno and Sons workers finished their day's work by sweeping the rubble off of Trinity Place. Behind the gap where the church once stood, you can see the Corning Tower, which is part of the Empire State Plaza.

I'm amazed and impressed that Ditonno and Sons was able to save most of the windows and other architectural elements from this historic church, and I'm deeply grateful that no one was hurt, killed, or rendered homeless as a result of Trinity Episcopal Church's collapse. I am nonetheless saddened and deeply angered by the loss of what should have been a carefully tended source of civic pride.

Warren Roberts, the distinguished historian of the French Revolution who has become an expert on the built environment of Albany, asserted last year that "no self-respecting city would allow Renwick's church on Trinity Place to decay [emphasis in the original]." On 12 July, the extent of Albany's lack of self-respect -- and, I fear, its lack of hope for its future -- became woefully evident.

Alleged thieves apprehended at Maryland Historical Society

Barry Landau: Presidential Historian and Collector (November 14, 2007) from Gerald R. Ford on Vimeo. Have you seen Mr. Landau in your research room?

Barry Landau is a former White House protocol officer and a prominent collector of ephemera and artifacts associated with U.S. presidents; he has a particular interest in materials relating to presidential inaugurations and the dogs of presidents. Laura Bush consulted him when planning George W. Bush's second inauguration, he's met most if not all of the recent presidents at least once, and, as you can see above, he has spoken at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library on at least one occasion.

He may also be a thief. On Saturday, Landau and his assistant, Jason Savedoff, were doing research at the Maryland Historical Society. A staffer observed Savedoff take a document, conceal it in a portfolio, and take it out of the research room. They kept an eye on the duo and called the police, who opened the locker assigned to Savedoff and discovered approximately 60 documents belonging to the Maryland Historical Society, including:

• Papers signed by Abraham Lincoln and worth approximately $300,000
• Inaugural ball invitations worth roughly $500,000
• A Washington Monument commemoration worth an estimated $100,000

The police called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has opened an investigation into the activities of Landau and Savedoff. They also took Landau and Savedoff, both of whom live in New York City, to jail, where they remain at the time of this writing.

It's important to remember that, in the eyes of the law, Landau and Savedoff are innocent until they have their day in court. However, the evidence against them seems quite damning -- and the judge who denied them bail apparently agrees.

Owing to the ongoing investigation, Maryland Historical Society staffers haven't said much about the arrest of Landau and Savedoff. However, it's pretty plain that they were on the ball: they were keeping an eye on their researchers, observed behavior that aroused their suspicions, and continued monitoring the research room while waiting for the police to arrive. Once they're at liberty to discuss the incident, we may learn that they were also providing "enhanced customer service," performing "quality control audits," and videotaping the duo.

It's also apparent that Maryland Historical Society staff weren't unduly swayed by Landau's prominence -- or by the fact that he and Savedoff brought them cupcakes. Archivists are, by and large, a helpful bunch, and most of us want to make the research process as user-friendly as possible. It's all too easy to conclude that the friendly researcher who frequently graces our research room is trustworthy and thus doesn't need to be monitored very closely. It's also easy to decide that a prominent researcher should be allowed to bend a few rules -- or that a powerful, well-known person shouldn't be challenged or provoked in any way.

The arrest of Landau and Savedoff is an excellent reminder that neither friendliness nor prominence should induce us to disregard our security protocols or relax our research room rules. The Maryland Historical Society could have suffered grievous harm not only to its holdings but also to its public image and staff morale. Thanks to the actions of its staff, its collections have not been compromised, its reputation remains intact, and staff can hold their heads high.

Before you heave a sigh of relief that Landau and Savedoff are off the streets and out of the archives, please keep in mind that they have visited other repositories -- and that they might not have used their real names when doing so. The Baltimore Sun is reporting that:

. . . . Lee Arnold, senior director of the library and collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, said Landau and Savedoff -- using the name "Jason James" -- had visited more than a dozen times since December, identifying themselves as uncle and nephew . . . .

Landau introduced himself as a scholar and donated a copy of his first book to the society, and each time he came bearing cookies. But when officials tried to write him a thank-you note, it was sent back as undeliverable. An email address Savedoff gave also appeared to be invalid. Staff became suspicious and called a meeting, and planned to check their driver's licenses upon the next visit.

Moreover, Savedoff doesn't seem like the sort of person a legitimate researcher would hire as an assistant:

Of Landau, Arnold said: "He certainly was very personable. He had class. He knew how to conduct himself in a research library." But Savedoff, of whom little is known, was "rough around the edges" and "repeatedly asked naive questions," he said.

"He never understood what we were saying," Arnold said.

In the coming weeks, many of us will have to spend a little time reviewing our researcher registrations. For at least a few of us, this review will be the first step in a long, intensive effort involving the FBI and exhaustive inventorying of collections accessed by Landau and Savedoff.

Want to avoid being victimized by the likes of Landau and Savedoff? The Society of American Archivists has published an archival security guide and regularly offers a first-rate archival security workshop, there's a peer-reviewed journal devoted to security matters, and I've posted some strategies and tips from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's new Holdings Protection Team here and here. Other resources are out there if you look for them.

Spontaneous Scholarships for SAA Annual Meeting

Kate T. over at ArchivesNext is a font of amazing ideas that would never in a million years cross my mind. A few days ago, she asked her Facebook friends and Twitter followers to contribute $20.00 each to help a grad student attend this year's annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The contributions quickly exceeded the cost of a single registration fee, and the Spontaneous Scholarships were born.

Here's the deal:

• If you would like to attend the annual meeting but don't have the resources to do so, contact Kate at info[at]archivesnext.com no later than midnight on Friday, 8 July. You do not need to explain why you are requesting one of these scholarships, but you must be an SAA member and note whether you are a regular or student SAA member. Kate will select scholarship winners -- and create a "waiting list" of applicants who will be funded if more donations are received -- by drawing applicants' names from a hat.
  
• If you are in a position to make a donation -- large or small -- to this effort, you can do so via PayPal (there's a handy link on the ArchivesNext homepage) or via snail mail (e-mail Kate for a physical address). Kate will accept donations received after 8 July, but please keep in mind that recipients will need some time to make travel arrangements and that 11 July is the Early Bird registration deadline.

Please note that the Spontaneous Scholarships are meant to defray the annual meeting registration fee and that recipients will be responsible for all travel and lodging costs. However, this is a great opportunity for people whose careers are just starting or are between jobs at the moment, and, as always, I'm once again astounded by the inventive way in which Kate identified a problem and unhesitatingly took practical action. The Spontaneous Scholarships won't fix the larger problem -- the manner in which the annual meeting registration fee inhibits students' and new archivists' participation in SAA -- but they will help several people who might not otherwise be able to attend this year's meeting.

I realize that times are tough and that donating to the Spontaneous Scholarships fund isn't an option for everyone. However, if you are able to do so, please consider making a contribution.

Image: Fireworks over the Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York, 4 July 2011, 9:03 PM.

Looking for a digital preservation workshop or course?

The Library of Congress's Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) initiative has a new online calendar of online and in-person digital preservation courses and workshops offered by American academic institutions and professional associations.

At present, the calendar includes offerings from the following organizations:

• AIMS Project
  
• American Library Association
• Amigos
• Library of Congress
• Los Angeles Preservation Network
  
• Lyrasis
• National Association of Government Archivists and Records Administrators
• North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
• Northeast Document Conservation Center
• Purdue University Libraries
• Rare Book School
  
• Society of American Archivists

You can sort the offerings by title, start date, format (i.e., on site or online), location, and cost. You can also use this dandy Web form to add information about courses and workshops that your own organization is offering.

Despite our best intentions, efforts to publicize continuing education opportunities are sometimes scattershot or excessively localized. We've needed a calendar of this sort for quite some time, and I'm really glad that DPOE has created it. I plan to consult it frequently and add to it as appropriate. Please do the same.

Archival mysteries

Yesterday, Der Spiegel and Lens, the visual and multimedia reporting blog of the New York Times, published a lengthy, unsettling, and thought-provoking post about a Nazi photo album that has recently surfaced. The album is unusual in that it depicts both Nazi leaders -- Hitler among them -- and victims of Nazi persecution. No one, including the elderly garment industry executive who received it in lieu of cash repayment of a loan, knew who created it, but it documents the travels of a Nazi Party unit responsible for planning mass rallies from Berlin to Minsk and Smolensk -- via Danzig (now Gdansk), Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), and Barysaw -- and to Munich.

The owner of the album, who has pressing health and financial problems, wants to sell it, and he hoped that pinpointing its provenance would increase its selling price. The New York Times, intrigued by the historical mystery, researched the album, digitized some of its images, and put them online in hopes that readers would be able to shed light on its origins; however, they made it plain to the owner that their findings might decrease the album's monetary value and that they would not ask any of the experts that they consulted to furnish an estimate of the album's selling price.

Lens author David Dunlap and his colleagues consulted with staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, and New York University and with professors at New York University and Columbia and learned the following:

• As even a cursory glance at the well-composed and well-executed photographs reveals, the photographer was a skilled professional. Moreover, the photographer may have been attached to the Propagandakompanie of the Wehrmacht, and this album may have been his personal property.
  
• The pictures were taken in 1941, as evidenced by images of a meeting between Hitler and Admiral Miklos Horvathy, the regent of Hungary, in what was then the East Prussian city of Rastenburg (now Katrzyn, Poland).
  
• The album contains a number of images of prisoners of war, including several of prisoners who wore yellow Stars of David. Photographs of Jewish P.O.W.'s are relatively rare: in most instances, Jewish P.O.W.'s were swiftly turned over to the S.S. and executed, a fate that almost certainly befell the Jews depicted in this album.
  
• One of the images of prisoners is identical to photograph No. 1907/15 held by Vad Yashem's Stephen Spielberg Jewish Film Archive.
  
• The photographer himself appears in several of the images, most notably those taken in Bavaria, where he wore civilian clothes. Moreover, many of the Bavarian photographs, including several in which the photographer is depicted, feature an anonymous woman.

In a textbook example of the value of crowdsourcing, the mystery of the album was solved a few hours after the New York Times and Der Spiegel published the images. Harriet Scharnberg, a German doctoral student who is researching German propaganda photographs depicting Jews, recognized the images of Jewish prisoners and identified the photographer, Franz Krieger (1914-1993), a native of Salzburg, Austria who left the S.S. to join the Propagandakompanie in 1941. Dr. Peter Kramml, the author of a book on Krieger's work, also identified Krieger and supplied confirming evidence.

Scharnberg and Kramml shed light on the circumstances that led to the album's creation and, to a lesser extent, its arrival in the United States:

• Krieger traveled to the Eastern Front in August 1941, and the album documents his journey. He photographed the meeting between Hitler and Horvathy on his way home from the front.
  
• The woman in the Bavarian photos is Krieger's wife Frieda, who died in the 17 November 1944 Allied bombing raid on Salzburg; the couple's two year-old daughter, Heidrun, also perished.
• Shortly after Krieger returned from the Eastern Front, he left the Propagandakompanie and became a regular soldier, and when the war ended he became a businessman. He never again worked as a professional photographer.
  
• The album, which might have been among the photographs that his mother apparently gave away at one point, was most likely brought to the United States by an American soldier, but its postwar chain of custody may always remain a mystery.
  

I strongly encourage you to check out the Lens posts (or, if you're fluent in German, the Der Speigel post, which is available here). The images are compelling and disturbing, and the speed with which the album's creator was identified ought to be an inspiration to archivists and other people seeking to learn more about records that have a tantalizingly incomplete provenance.

We should nonetheless keep in mind the counsel of Marvin Taylor, the head of New York University's Fales Library, who noted before the images were published that the photographs were printed on two different types of paper and thus may have been the work of more than one person, that the album might have been assembled by a third party, and that the photographs might not have been in chronological order: "We think we can get so close to these people [i.e., records creators], but we can’t. They are not the same people we are. We come up with assumptions -- and the material always undermines what we think." Although it's heartening to see an archival mystery solved with such speed and accuracy, we archivists should always keep in mind that some of our mysteries resist solution and that our own assumptions and conclusions may lead us astray.

And if you believe that the digital age will be devoid of archival mystery, let me assure you that, thanks to missing and incorrect metadata, corrupted files, ill-advised migrations and conversions, murky transfers of custody, and a host of other problems, we are on the cusp of a most mysterious age. Earlier today, I was looking through a series of born-digital photographs in an effort to find exhibit-worthy images and started scrutinizing their internal timestamps, which are visible only when the images are displayed at 10 times their original size and which aren't included in the metadata that accompanied these images. I quickly realized that when sorted by file name, these images, which were taken seconds apart and run through a variety of systems before they were transferred to my repository, are actually in reverse chronological order -- something that escaped me when I initially processed these files several years ago. This isn't the first digital mystery I've encountered, and it most certainly won't be the last.

E-mail management, part two

. . . And now for something completely different. David Stephens's approach to managing e-mail, which I posted about yesterday, is an enterprise-level solution to an enterprise-level problem. What about those of us -- l'Archivista among them -- who just can't seem to manage their personal e-mail appropriately? I've got a couple of personal accounts that are filled with sales pitches, listserv detritus, and other stuff that I really should delete, but I've got generous storage quotas and a finite amount of time. I've also got pretty decent search capability, but the volume of junk is starting to affect my search results. I recently needed to track down a Continental e-ticket and had to wade through a bunch of old Continental sales pitches before I could find it. Urgh.

For some of us, a new service, GiveBackMail, may help. GiveBackMail displays a new advertisement each time a user sends, opens, or deletes a message, and the service makes a small donation to charity each time a user performs one of these actions. At present, GiveBackMail allows users to earmark their donations for one of seven non-profit organizations working in a variety of areas: cancer, education, conservation, animal welfare, people with AIDS, microlending, and victims of the recent tornadoes. GiveBackMail hopes to add additional charities, and account holders can suggest charities that might warrant inclusion.

GiveBackMail users have the option of routing one or more of their existing AOL, GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo accounts through GiveBackMail or setting up a separate GiveBackMail account; if they opt for the latter, they can keep their existing e-mail addresses and their correspondents will be none the wiser. Users can also the service to post updates to their Facebook or Twitter accounts.

A recent New York Times article notes that GiveBackMail's business model seeks to redirect users' eyeballs: instead of viewing ads served up by AOL, Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, GiveBackMail wants you to route your e-mail through its servers and to view the ads it displays, and its charitable donations are designed to induce you not only to reroute your e-mail but also to change your e-mail management practices.

The Times article also notes that GiveBackMail is built upon the embedded-giving model that myriad corporations have recently embraced. If you purchase something or do something, a portion of the purchase price or corporate funds (up to a certain amount) will be donated to a specific cause. As Laura Starita points out, we should all think critically about this model, which can render "philanthropy subject to the retail cycle," undermine donor trust by failing to communicate how donations are being used, corrupt the desire to give by melding it with the desire to acquire, and paper over problematic environmental, labor, or other practices. However, if you're comfortable with viewing a few ads, think that the prospect of directing small sums of money to a non-profit organization will motivate you to clean up your inbox, and keep in mind that using GiveBackMail won't make you any sort of activist, then you might want to check it out. Moreover, GiveBackMail supplies monthly statements outlining how each users' donations have helped the charity he or she selected, which ought to help users feel more confident about the service.

I recently registered with GiveBackMail, and I found the process simple. I have only one complaint: I discovered only when I first attempted to register that GiveBackMail cannot be used to manage free, basic Yahoo e-mail accounts. GiveBackMail works only with Yahoo Plus accounts, but there is no mention of this fact anywhere in the "How It Works" or "Features" sections of the GiveBackMail site. I can't determine from the GiveBackMail site whether GiveBackMail works with the free versions of AOL, GMail, or Hotmail.

Undeterred by GiveBackMail's inability to help me get a grip on my Yahoo accounts, I set up a separate GiveBackMail account and plan on using it for a few routine things. GiveBackMail is currently in beta mode, and, as the Times points out, there's always the possibility that Google or one of the other big Web e-mail providers will undercut GiveBackMail by replicating its view-an-ad-make-a-donation business model, so I'm not 100 percent certain I want to make it my primary account at this time. However, so far I've been pretty pleased with GiveBackMail. Its interface is simple and intuitive, and it seems to do what it's supposed to do -- enable me to send, receive, organize, and delete messages and keep track of contacts -- without any hitches. Moreover, at least in the short term, I've gotten better at deleting all those useless messages . . . .

E-mail management, part one

A few days ago, I attended a Central New York ARMA event at which David O. Stephens analyzed the Top Ten Issues Driving Records Management Today. As might be expected, Stephens devoted a lot of attention to the challenges posed by electronic records, and I was particularly struck by his strategy for improving the management of e-mail.

Stephens noted that e-mail is now the dominant form of business communication: more than 60 percent of electronic business documents are transmitted as e-mail attachments, and up to 60 percent of business-critical information is stored in the messaging environment. However, IT departments struggling to keep e-mail systems operational typically purge all messages after a relatively short time (e.g., 90 days) or force end users to limit the number of messages stored in the system. End users who need to retain older messages must either save them to an "archive" on a local or shared hard drive or print them out.

From a legal discovery standpoint, these practices are profoundly troubling: retaining messages that could have been disposed of increases an organization's legal exposure, combing through individual e-mail archives, paper printouts, or backup tapes is time- and resource-intensive, and overlooking an obscure archive or tape stored offsite can have devastating consequences.

Stephens also pointed out that the orthodox records management approach to e-mail -- having end users match the content of individual messages to a specific records series and organize the messages accordingly -- is, quite simply, a recipe for failure. Unfortunately, too many records managers still believe that end users must be responsible for managing their own e-mail.

Stephens asserted that individual messages fall into one of three categories -- short-term value, medium-term value, and long-term value -- and treating each category as follows:

• Short-term. This category comprises messages of transitory value. Users should be trained to identify such messages and to delete them from their mailboxes on a daily basis. Most users will have to devote 10-15 minutes a day to doing so, and supervisors should support and encourage this practice.
• Medium-term. Messages not deleted by users should be classified as having routine business value and should be automatically transferred to an e-mail archiving system at regular intervals. These messages should be retained in the e-mail archiving system for 3-7 years depending upon the organization's resources and needs; 3 years is generally the minimum retention period needed to satisfy legal requirements, but organizations that opt for a more conservative approach may opt to keep e-mail for 5-7 years.
• Long-term: The number of employees who send or receive messages that should be retained for more than 3-7 years is relatively small, and the total number of messages that warrant lengthy retention is also small. Employees who are likely to send or receive such messages should be taught how to identify them and to either print them out or transfer them to an electronic records management (ERM) system.
  

As Stephens points out, this approach isn't perfect: some employees simply won't identify and delete messages of transitory value, and some employees who send and receive messages that have long-term retention needs won't consistently identify them and remove them from the messaging environment. However, it is a vast improvement upon current practice: it relieves end users of all responsibility for managing messages of routine business value, relieves IT and legal staff of the obligation to go through backup tapes and those pesky individual e-mail archives, and ensures that messages that have reached the end of their retention period won't hang around and increase the organization's legal exposure.

The only problem that I have with Stephens's approach is its reliance upon technology -- not because I believe that e-mail archiving systems and ERM systems are inherently deficient but because many records managers will find it hard to justify their purchase, particularly in the current economic climate. In the absence of pressing e-discovery concerns or regulatory requirements, governments and a substantial number of non-profit and corporate bodies will no doubt continue to classify e-mail archiving systems and electronic recordkeeping systems as second- or third-tier priorities.

Moreover, in some instances, organizations that see the need for these IT investments may have difficulty finding products that truly meet their needs. Owing to the market dominance of Microsoft Enterprise/Outlook, users of Enterprise/Outlook systems can select from a wide array of compatible e-mail archiving products. Lotus Notes users also have a decent number of choices, but users of other systems have fewer options. Users who are outsourcing their e-mail to the cloud may well be dependent upon their cloud service providers.

I nonetheless hope that records managers embrace this approach and start pressing their employers to make the requisite IT investments. Stephens noted that when we get snail mail at home, we toss the junk mail, put the magazines on the coffee table or nightstand, and place the bills in our "to-do" pile, but we don't put any of this stuff back in the mailbox. Why, then, are we storing e-mail in our inboxes? We need to start asking senior managers and IT personnel this question and pushing them for a better answer.