E-World Zapping Paper Trail
n the paper-based world, life seemed simple. Armies of file clerks assured us there was a place for everything and everything was in its place. Large organizations often maintained central file rooms-some still do-and one could be reasonably assured that the organization's institutional memory resided, neatly tabbed and ordered, in one place.
Even the advent of computers didn't change things all that much, at least initially. The notion of ordering information according to some foreordained structure, now called files and records, was part of the new computer culture. Even keeping backup files and setting up disposition schedules was part of the orderly operation of data processing systems developed from the 1950s to the 1970s.
In the 1980s, use of information technology in the office shifted in a fundamental way. Word processors replaced typewriters, and more importantly, some documents existed only in electronic form. Then electronic mail began to replace paper letters and memos, and fewer of those communications found their way onto paper.
Keep the Filing Cabinet
Managers-federal managers in particular-have an obligation to preserve information for several reasons. The most immediate is operational necessity. In handling John Doe or Mary Smith's claim or request, it is helpful to have access to their earnings information, previous correspondence or other information relevant to the final decision. Today, that information pops up on a computer screen.
Beyond day-to-day operations, everyone in the economy deals with regulatory and enforcement requirements. As a general rule in the private sector, you may destroy records unless there is a requirement to retain them.
Federal managers, on the other hand, must presume the opposite. As a general rule, federal officials may not destroy a record (see your lawyer or records manager for the definition of a record) unless they are expressly authorized to do so by the Archivist of the United States. The Federal Records Act and related statutes rest on the premise that public servants have a special obligation to preserve and make accessible a clear record of what they do, to be accountable in the short run and to enlighten students and historians in the long run.
In the first legal test of the shift to electronic records, a public interest group, the National Security Archive, sued the Reagan administration in connection with the Iran-Contra affair. The group argued the administration had an obligation to preserve electronic communications and subject them to the same guidelines as paper records. As a result of that litigation, the White House agreed to preserve all e-mail that was deemed record material. In the court's decision and subsequent consent decree, it dismissed the notion that the White House and Executive Office agencies could comply with the Federal Records Act (and the Presidential Records Preservation Act) by merely printing out e-mails it deemed to be records and putting them into paper files. The court recognized that the electronic record contains important additional information, such as who got the message and when it was sent, that would not be in the paper files.
While the National Security Archive case dealt only with electronic mail, its potential application to other electronic records such as word processing documents or spreadsheets is significant. Despite this apparent legal precedent, the National Archives and Records Administration issued regulations authorizing agencies to destroy electronic files if they printed out paper records. Not surprisingly, the courts quickly found those rules to be inconsistent with the law, and the Archives is regrouping. The agency formed an interagency working group and in late December announced a collaborative effort with the Defense Department to examine DoD's standard for electronic records management as a possible governmentwide model.
The management implications of electronic records are substantial. At a personal level, every federal employee should assume that any electronic communication will be preserved and available for review, unless exempted from disclosure.
Second, preserving electronic records is a significant and expensive job. Your computer staff is most likely backing up your files-the electronic equivalent of taking snapshots of each document-so they can be restored in case of a malfunction. But that does not meet the Federal Records Act requirement to keep files indexed and readily accessible.
Record-Setting Changes
As if the challenge of e-mail and the like were not enough, the Internet and World Wide Web raise a whole new set of issues. The National Archives is only beginning to grapple with records management at agency Web sites, which feature constantly changing information.
Another wrinkle in preserving information is the ever-changing media used to store it. How does the National Archives, which is ultimately responsible for all records "of sufficient historic or other value to warrant permanent preservation" keep up when information exists only on a medium that we no longer have the technology to read? This problem became real when the Defense Department learned that some of its records from the Vietnam War were stored on a form of microfilm it no longer had readers for.
While the underlying principles of records preservation remain unchanged, how all of this will work in the constantly changing electronic world is less obvious.
Franklin S. Reeder heads The Reeder Group, a Washington-based consulting firm, after more than 35 years in government at the Executive Office of the President and OMB.