[Editor’s Note: This article is provided as an example of best practices in the Information Technology (IT) area. Administrative Rule 9(G)(1)(h) excludes from public access all personal notes and e-mail, and deliberative material, of judges, jurors, court staff, and judicial agencies, and information recorded in personal data assistants (PDA’s) or organizers and personal calendars.]
Courts have seen many cost and time saving benefits from email communications; but this new technology has not been without its challenges. In the summer of 2008, the Bartholomew County Director of Information Technology (“IT”) brought two matters of concern to the local Public Records Commission (“PRC”): the size of employees’ email accounts and public records requests.
As the elected chairman of the PRC, I chaired a subcommittee that addressed these issues. The other members of the Commission include the County Commissioner, Auditor, Clerk, Recorder, Superintendent of Schools, and the Columbus City Clerk. IT was concerned because in that year Tippecanoe County had received a public records request for all emails from the accounts of 25 employees over a 21 month period relating to a potential detention center expansion. Such a request in Bartholomew County would cripple our IT department. The IT department does not have the resources to sort through two years of email to respond to this type of broad public records request.
Some of our county employees had email accounts with over two million kilobytes (KBs) of data. Much of this “data” consisted of photos and attachments which were passed from employee to employee. These emails were not work related (unless one finds sending funny pictures of animals dressed in costumes to be a job related morale booster). And, after Bartholomew County experienced a horrendous flood in June 2008, email account sizes jumped tremendously as employees shared photos of impacted sites. The size of email accounts increased exponentially, and this data was being backed up daily.
The IT department focused on solving two related problems: 1) the wasted space being used by these emails on expensive backup disks, and 2) the potential burden on the IT department that would be caused by a public records request. The IT department was most concerned with an information request because they would need to either sort through all of the data in order to cull out just what was requested, or deliver the entire contents of an employee’s mailbox and allow the requesting entity to sort through it. The latter alternative was unacceptable.
We developed a policy to limit mailbox sizes and establish retention procedures. We first notified all department heads and office holders of the issues. Upon receipt of the proposal to limit mailbox sizes, employee angst and trepidation was widespread. We held an informational meeting with simple tips on how to reduce mailbox sizes. Most employees were not aware of the need to delete their SENT items and then to EMPTY THE TRASH for the DELETED items. They learned that just clearing out the SENT and DELETED folders frees up a significant amount of space. IT developed a tutorial demonstrating these simple procedures and how to check one’s mailbox size.
We invited all department heads and office holders to meet with a PRC subcommittee to draft a policy. After receiving comments, we sent the final draft for review to Jim Corridan, Director of the Indiana Commission on Public Records. Upon its return, our PRC voted its approval and the County Commissioners adopted it.
The new policy defines emails as either non-record (transitory) emails or public-record emails. Non-record emails include personal correspondence, holiday notices, meeting confirmations, etc. Public-record emails relate to the conduct of public business. If an email is to be retained under a department’s public records retention schedule, the sender of the email is responsible for its retention, which should be on hard copy or on a shared network drive.
The Policy also provides that the maximum size of a mailbox is 100,000 KBs of data (equivalent to 3,000 average text documents). IT will notify users upon reaching 90% of capacity, and that at maximum capacity they will not be able to receive or send additional emails. All DELETED emails will be purged automatically on a daily basis. Retained emails will be archived for three years. If there is a lawsuit or threat of a lawsuit, all emails will be saved until the suit is resolved.
Our adoption of this policy is timely. At the judicial conference in September, we learned that the Delaware County local media submitted a Public Records Request in August 2009 seeking all electronic correspondence of all county employees for a one-day period. The stated purpose of this request is to look at a snapshot of county employees’ computer use to determine if employees are wasting taxpayers’ dollars by inappropriately spending time on the internet or passing jokes around via email.
Bartholomew County’s policy will not cure all misuses of email by employees, but it will provide a curb on it without the necessity of monitoring individual use.