Emails are records: The state policy on deleting them hurts the public; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 4/10/15

Editorial Board, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Emails are records: The state policy on deleting them hurts the public:

"The open records law is supposed to give citizens access to information that shows how government conducts business on their behalf.

The state’s highest court should decide sooner rather than later that the email policy improperly neuters the law by allowing the premature destruction of records. Failing that, the Legislature should amend the law to require state agencies to retain public records for a reasonable period and that employees who send and receive the emails should not be the ones responsible for deciding if they’re worth keeping."

Hillary Clinton Tries to Quell Controversy Over Private Email; New York Times, 3/10/15

Amy Chozick and Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times; Hillary Clinton Tries to Quell Controversy Over Private Email:

"“I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two,” she explained. She asked, in effect, that voters trust that she was disclosing more of them than she needed to — and even to credit her with an unusual degree of transparency.

Mrs. Clinton said she turned over some 30,490 emails to the State Department in December, nearly two years after leaving office. But she said she had deleted nearly 32,000 others.

Her confirmation that she and her aides had chosen which emails to make available to the State Department raised new concerns about Mrs. Clinton’s power to decide which records of her tenure as secretary would be available to congressional investigators, to journalists filing Freedom of Information Act requests, and to history."

Librarians Protest Canada Cutbacks; Chronicle of Higher Education via New York Times, 1/26/14

Karen Birchard and Jennifer Lewington, Chronicle of Higher Education via New York Times; Librarians Protest Canada Cutbacks:

"A move by the Canadian government to shrink the number of its departmental research libraries is drawing fire from some academics, who fear a loss of data and trained personnel and damage to the country’s ability to carry out research.

The closing of seven regional libraries in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the quiet elimination of more than two dozen libraries in other departments, might otherwise have passed largely unnoticed, given the modest cost savings...

Gail Shea, head of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, or D.F.O., adamantly denied any book burning. “Our government values these collections and will continue to strongly support it by continuing to add new material on an ongoing basis,” she said in a statement. “All materials for which D.F.O. has copyright will be preserved by the department.”

Despite such assurances, some academic researchers and librarians remain skeptical.

“My overwhelming feeling is that we don’t know exactly what some of the ramifications are for my future research or other people’s research because of the nonsystematic way it has been done,” said John Reynolds, a professor of aquatic ecology at Simon Fraser University who uses federal government fisheries data on British Columbia streams for his study of salmon sustainability.

He questioned why the government had failed to publish an inventory of library materials before and after the downsizing, including documents not covered by copyright."