The Biggest Headache: Preserving Official E-Mail

ention electronic mail to some federal managers and you'll get a response that's all but incomprehensible outside Washington. They'll roll their eyes and mumble about records schedules, archives and Ralph Nader.

The source of their discomfort is the millions of messages agencies generate each day. Some portion of those messages pertain to official business and need to be preserved in the government's archives. How to do that is at the heart of a long-running legal battle.

The National Archives and Records Administration had its knuckles rapped sharply in April for clinging to its position that agencies can preserve e-mail and other online records for posterity by printing them out and storing the printouts. The reprimand came from U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman in connection with a suit filed in 1995 by Public Citizen, an organization founded by Ralph Nader. Public Citizen successfully challenged the legality of maintaining electronically generated records by converting them to paper. The group argued that some elements, primarily cross-references and contextual data, were lost in the course of printing out the records.

In October, Friedman invalidated NARA's General Records Schedule 20, which contained the preservation guidance. The Justice Department appealed that ruling, but it remains in effect for now. This year NARA still was advising agencies to dispose of records in accordance with GRS 20. Now the judge has told agencies (in the absence of further legal actions) that they can continue their current disposition practices until Sept. 30, while a NARA-led interagency working group considers the alternatives. To some observers, the options are not pretty.

First, someone needs to determine whether a message, spreadsheet, word processing document, PC slide presentation or other electronic file is potentially an official record. Federal employees make such determinations routinely for the paperwork they handle, but it's harder to sort through electronic records. One problem: Which version(s) of the files must be saved?

Then you need an electronic storage system that will support records disposal procedures. Each agency establishes standard procedures for different categories of records, such as invoices, administrative memos, press releases and so on. For example, at the National Highway Institute, memos are to be destroyed after two years, but budget files are saved for 10 years-the last five of those years at a federal records center.

Finally, you need to be able to find specific items within the records repository. That means labeling and indexing. The complete process is more complex, but these are the basic issues.

Although all electronic files in federal offices are covered by the court case, e-mail seems to give records managers the biggest headache. That's partly because e-mail systems carry a high volume of messages-1 million a day at the Health and Human Services Department alone-and those messages are a mixed bag. Agencies that preserve all e-mail are wasting money because only a fraction of the messages (perhaps one in eight) are official records.

In addition, message "subject" labels are not always helpful. A message labeled "Administrator's Daily Briefing" could be high-level, mission-related information or the annual exhortation to give to the Combined Federal Campaign-or both.

"The tools are not in the marketplace" to help employees distinguish between official records and those that need not be saved, says Anne Thomson Reed, chief information officer for the Agriculture Department. The retrieval tools are equally lacking, she says. The products that are available tend to be expensive and to require a lot of employee time.

But one information technology vendor, SMS Data Products Group of McLean, Va., has begun selling a simple-to-understand system that could help agencies get the job done. The system stores e-mail messages on recordable compact disks (CD-R). Many CD-R disks are arrayed in a jukebox, and more than one jukebox can be hooked up to provide vast amounts of storage capacity.

The agency directs its employees to determine whether each piece of e-mail they receive is an official record. If it is, the employee appends a storage category to the "subject" label and forwards the message via e-mail to a storage server, which reads the storage category label the message accordingly. Problem solved, as long as each employee has a ready list of storage categories and follows orders.

Equally impressive, e-mail users can retrieve archived messages simply by using the "find" feature of their mail software, just as if they were looking for a saved message in their own desktops. The system works with most major e-mail packages and with files attached to e-mail, according to Joseph S. Grajewski, an SMS Data Products vice president.

Managers can't afford to ignore directives and court rulings about archiving e-mail and other electronic records, Grajewski says. "It's one of the few crimes a federal employee can get thrown in jail for."