Locked e-mail creates problems

Ohio laws are fuzzy regarding e-mail as matters of record.

COLUMBUS (AP) — Gov. Bob Taft had tons of documents dutifully trucked to the state archive after he left office, including disks containing the administration’s electronic mail. More than a year later, the e-mails can’t be opened.

State archivists are scrambling to hire a specialist in their field who also has the computer skills necessary to contend with government e-mail, which has evolved into a nightmare for public records handlers.

“E-mail is a very complicated issue, and it’s something that archivists all over the country are still struggling with,” said Pari Swift, assistant state archivist for Ohio. “Unlike paper records, electronic records aren’t going to survive by accident. There has to be a conscious effort.”

Their conversational flare and susceptibility to political misstep make e-mails an attractive target for journalists and citizens eager to hold government officials accountable.

State laws — including Ohio’s — are often fuzzy on which e-mails to save, how long to save them and the manner in which they should be retained. Does it need to be backed up to a disk or printed out on paper? Is an e-mail sent to three people then three separate records? And do all three really need to be kept?

Another problem presented by e-mail is its monstrous volume.

“E-mail has become the de facto communication device between public officials and each other and their constituents,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “Whereas we used to write memos and briefs and letters and things like that, these days those things don’t exist in paper form.”

Dalglish said e-mails are far less efficient than memos or letters used to be, shooting back and forth with single facts rather than a litany of related matter. But she said that doesn’t diminish the fact that they are being used to conduct government business that the public has a right to investigate.

“Obviously, it’s more effective the greater specificity you can give somebody who’s hunting for the information. Public officials and public employees hate fishing expeditions,” she said. “But if state law allows you to see correspondence between the lieutenant governor and the governor, then you should be able to see that. It shouldn’t matter whether it was done by e-mail or on paper.”

Ohio has no specific legal requirement that all government e-mails be saved. Instead, the state’s public records laws list different sorts of documents — policy memos or personnel records, for example — that have to be retained, whether they are in electronic or paper form. Local governments, meanwhile, all have their own rules for discarding e-mail.

That means personal e-mails that a government worker sends on work time from a work computer — say, sharing a picture of a new grandchild with a co-worker — are not public records.

“If it’s a request for e-mails between X person and Y person between these dates, with no indication of what the content or the subject of those e-mails might be, then it’s impossible for the office to retrieve,” said Lauren Lubow, the assistant attorney general for public records. “The content turns out to be an essential element.”

Taft’s administration, bombarded with requests for its e-mails in 2005 amid a state investment scandal, printed out more than 60,000 e-mails in paper form for reporters to review. Jon Allison, Taft’s then-chief of staff, said they couldn’t be handed over electronically because some items had to be removed for legal reasons. When Taft left office at the end of 2006, the administration delivered 1,500 cubic feet of records to the state archive — the largest influx of governors’ records Swift had ever seen.

Ohio has guidelines, but no laws, dictating how e-mail must arrive at the state archive, Swift said.

The Ohio Electronic Records Committee, which put together e-mail retention guidelines several years ago, plans training this year to spread the word about its recommendations. Archivists don’t uniformly suggest printing out e-mails even on the most important subjects, Swift said.

“You still need to make sure you get all the metadata — your header and your subject line, the time stamps and the router stamps,” she said.