Report: Huge Number Of Maine Public Records Have Likely Been Destroyed
From the Portland Press Herald:
A huge number of emails and public documents from the administrations of Govs. Angus King and John Baldacci have likely been deleted from state government servers – some lost forever, others in storage on difficult-to-access backup tapes. The loss hampers the ability of citizens, historians, journalists and lawyers to learn how policies were developed and implemented.
State officials transferred emails and documents to backup devices as part of routine purges to free up server storage, not realizing many of them should have been retained in accessible forms and eventually transferred to the state archives, Maine State Archivist David Cheever said.
Most of the purges are believed to have taken place prior to the 2005 creation of the Office of Information Technology, which centralized and standardized state government computer services for the first time, but former officials say the practice continued sporadically until 2009.
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About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.