Here at the Government Records Section, we often talk about the life cycle of a record. In graduate school, I learned this term through some sort of circular graphic like this one that I found from Rutgers University:

This graphic is used to explain records management in a way that should be familiar to most of you. For electronic records, you can imagine the “distribution” icon as an email and the “maintain” icons as hard drives. The graphic is still helpful in illustrating the general definition that the Society of American Archivists gives for a record life cycle: “The distinct phases of a record’s existence, from creation to final disposition.”  As you can see, records are created for a purpose, used, stored for evidentiary (i.e. for audits) or reference purposes (“What was last year’s professional development travel budget again?”) for a period of time and then ultimately preserved in an archival environment or destroyed. (Check my previous blog for Value(s) of Records and Mark’s Destroy in Office: Not As Scary as it May Sound.)

Now there is more to this story when it comes to archival records. The permanent State Agency and County records we house at the State Archives of North Carolina have a life beyond the “disposition” stage where they are put in acid-free containers. First, archivists “process” the records, meaning we put together a description of what we see so that others can tell if there’s anything that interests them in a particular collection. We gather this descriptive information while we straighten out papers and put them into neat, acid-free containers, where they may last longer.  Then, of course, anyone can come in to our library and look at the collections. The materials in our collections could answer any number of questions you might have, or even inspire new ones! I’m always thinking up new article topics and questions whenever I’m looking through our vast and varied holdings.  So these records continue on their life cycle in another form: the narratives that users weave together from these historical records.

In case you missed it, Frayda Bluestein of UNC School of Government did a blog post last month about pending bills in the North Carolina General Assembly that deal with public records. Frayda also explores the implications of the proposed (but not yet passed) Senate Bill 617, which would allow public agencies to charge for personnel costs incurred in making copies in response to a public records request.

Also of interest to readers of this blog is House Bill 870, which would require the audio or video recording of closed sessions of public meetings. According to the current version of the bill, recordings of closed sessions that become eligible for public inspection must be retained for at least two years from the date of the public release of the recording. This bill has passed the House and moved to the Senate.

Keep your eye on this blog for updates on these bills. I’m sure Frayda and the folks at the SOG will be monitoring their progress, as do many of our professional organizations.

This post is a reminder that the Local Records Unit of the State Archives of North Carolina is offering a series of free 3-hour workshops on managing public records in a variety of locations across the state from mid-May to mid-June.  Our first set of workshops, offered mostly during the month of March, was very successful, and we’d like to extend that success to other parts of the state.

 Topics discussed will include public records law, records management principles, using the records retention and disposition schedule, electronic records (including scanning and email), and disaster preparedness.  If you were considering signing up during the initial announcement but haven’t done so yet, please sign up now.  Please also link this announcement to anyone who might be interested in attending.   If you are a state employee interested in attending a public records workshop, please contact your agency’s records management analyst for information on state agency workshops. 

 All workshops will be held from 1-4 and, again, are free of charge to local government employees and officials. These workshops have also been approved for 3 hours of continuing education for registers of deeds and tax administrators.  Below is a list of the dates and locations of the workshops.

 Lumberton, May 14
City Council Chambers
500 N. Cedar
Lumberton, NC 28358 

Williamston, May 23
Moratoc Park
102 River Road
Williamston, NC 27892 

Wilmington, May 30
New Hanover Government Center
230 Government Center Dr.
Wilmington, NC 28403

Carrboro, June 6
Orange Water and Sewer Authority Operations Center
400 Jones Ferry Rd.
Carrboro, NC 27510

Greensboro, June 11
Guilford County Agricultural Extension
3309 Burlington Rd.
Greensboro, NC 27405

If you would like to attend one of these workshops, please contact Emily Hanna (emily.hanna@ncdcr.gov) for a registration form.

The Division of Archives and Records has published a new County Management Records Retention and Disposition Schedule. It is available on our website from this page.  The County Management Schedule covers many county government functions such as administration, personnel, budget and fiscal, code enforcement and inspection, and planning and zoning. Some county departments such as the Health Department, County Sheriff, and Registers of Deeds have their own schedules. If you’re in County Government and unsure which schedule you should be using, please contact a Local Records Analyst.

This new schedule needs to be adopted by the Board of County Commissioners in an open meeting and signed by the appropriate people on the signature page (third page of the schedule). Please send a copy of the completed signature page to our office for our records.

This edition of the Retention and Disposition Schedule is greatly improved over the previous schedule. We have deleted some items, combined others, and added other items. We have also clarified some item descriptions and disposition instructions.

Be sure to review the changed language on the signature page. Please see Carie Chesarino’s previous posts about the new administrative value policy and adoption of the schedule.

If you have any questions about this, or need a copy of the schedule with all the changes highlighted, please contact me, Carie Chesarino, Emily Hanna, or Jason Woolf.

Starting on May 1, 2013, I will no longer be a Local Record Archivist. I will be moving into a different role at the State Archives as Information Management Archivist. I am very excited about this opportunity. I will be working with MARS catalog, finding aids, and CONTENTdm. If you have any reference requests for non-processed records please contact Tom Vincent at Tom.Vincent@ncdcr.gov or 919-807-7354, Emily Hanna at Emily.Hanna@ncdcr.gov or 919-807-7360, or Carie Chesarino at Carolyn.Chesarino@ncdcr.gov or 919-807-7357. Thank you for a wonderful three years with the Local Records Unit.

Citizen:

The State Records Center loves the UNC School of Government blog, Coates’ Canons, as the careful reader may gather from this third post in a row pointing to particularly illustrative information. Kara Millonzi of the School of Government recently wrote this helpful blog post about texting and the Public Records Law. I am often asked what local government agencies should do about employees who text and Kara does a terrific job of illustrating why – there simply is not a “cure-all” blanket solution or retention for text messages:

“Note that the fact that these messages were sent or received from the manager’s privately-owned smartphone is not relevant to the inquiry of whether or not the texts are public records. Texts may be public records even if they are sent or received on an employee’s or official’s personal device. It is the content of the messages that is determinative.

Public record text messages must be retained based on content of message”

So we as government employees know that text messages are public records if they were made or received as a transaction of public business. What’s next? I second Kara’s (thanks for the shout-out!)  recommendation to review the following Electronic Records Section guidance documents:

Best Practices for Electronic Communications Usage in North Carolina: Text and Instant Message

Best Practices for Electronic Communications Usage in North Carolina:
Guidelines for Implementing a Strategy for Text and Instant Messages

In particular, local government agencies must figure out a technical solution for how they will retain text messages that are public records. As stated on page 8 of “Best Practices for Electronic Communications Usage in North Carolina: Text and Instant Message”:

“NOTE: Agencies and employees should not rely on service providers to provide records created by text/IM. Service providers may keep their own records of text and instant messages but they are not automatically obligated to provide a copy of those records to government entities… Employees are responsible for managing these records and ensuring that they be retained longer if the records retention and disposition schedule requires a longer retention period.”

An interesting question that may be open to debate is whether or not these texts from Kara’s example must be retained as texts:

	yeah. btw–Y potholes on Jones St. not fixed yet? ruining my car shocks. mayoer promised theyd be fixed 6 mnths ago. As usual LOPSOD
Manager:	BMY publ. werks crew painfully slow. will direct to fix asap
Citizen:	Thx. it’s doog to know peeps in high paces      :-}
Manager:	had 2 pull rank. crew will get there early next week at latest.. ITMT take Smith st.

As Kara correctly interprets the Municipal Records Retention and Disposition Schedule, these texts constitute a Citizen Complaint or Service Request, which has a disposition instruction of “retain in office for 1 year.” What if this particular manager works in a city with a formal system in place that handles Citizen Complaint or Service Requests? Can the manager enter the relevant information from the text into that system, retain the resulting record for 1 year, then delete the text? We probably will only know for sure if this matter were challenged in court. In the meantime, it is best to answer these questions ahead of time with some sort of policy and be consistent.

If you have a smartphone, consider checking out Tom’s post about the Sunshine Center of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition’s app.

The quick answer is no!

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is a federal law originally passed in 1966 that applies only to executive branch federal agencies. It doesn’t apply to Congress, the courts, or state or local governments.

If FOIA doesn’t apply in North Carolina, what does?

States have their own laws–referred to variously as Public Records, Open Records, Open Government, Sunshine, or Freedom of Information laws. North Carolina’s is the Public Records chapter of the General Statutes, more commonly known as G.S. 132. This law applies to every agency of state and local government, including “every public office, public officer or official (State or local, elected or appointed), institution, board, commission, bureau, council, department, authority or other unit of government of the State or of any county, unit, special district or other political subdivision of government.”

There are many exemptions to G.S. 132. Some of these exemptions are listed within G.S. 132 (e.g., social security numbers). Some are listed in other North Carolina statutes (e.g., personnel records, which are exempted in G.S. 147, G.S. 153, G.S. 160, G.S.115, G.S. 130, and several other statutes), and yet others are exempted through federal law (e.g., FERPA, HIPAA).

No matter how thorough, the laws listed above are still sometimes ambiguous. In these cases, we have to turn to North Carolina case law to see how the courts have interpreted the laws (e.g., whether private entities might be subject to public records law–see Frayda Bluestein’s excellent post at the UNC School of Government blog Coates’ Canons)

I’d wager that personnel files are some of the most well-known records that are exempt from public access in North Carolina.  They’re common to every office, and almost all of an employee’s personnel file is exempt from public access.  Those parts of it that are open to the public are laid out explicitly in the statutes. 

With that said, parts of a personnel file  are accessible by certain individuals.  For example, an employee’s supervisor has access to all of that person’s file.  How much access, though, does an employee have to his or her own personnel file?  Employee access is wide, but not absolute.  As with confidential information in general, there is some information that the employee may not see, and other information that the employee need not see.  (Please note that while the municipal and county personnel privacy statutes are identical, other local government agencies’ and state agencies’ statutes can differ in subtle, but important, ways.  Check with your analyst to see whether the rules discussed below apply to you.)

Here are the things in an employee’s personnel file that the employee can’t see:

1. Letters of reference solicited before employment
2. Information concerning a medical disability that a prudent physician would not divulge to his or her patient
3. Driver history information from the State Bureau of Investigation

These things may not be disclosed to an employee through the employee’s personnel file.  However, medical information should be withheld only upon advice from a physician or other health care professional, and current medical ethical standards oppose withholding such information without the patient’s knowledge.  In the third instance, if an employee wishes to see his or her driver history information, he or she may still do so through the Division of Motor Vehicles.

Here are the things in an employee’s personnel file that the employee need not see:

1. Testing or examination material for appointment, employment, or promotion purposes, if the disclosure of this information would compromise the test’s objectivity
2. Material used to investigate possible criminal actions of an employee, until the investigation is concluded
3. Information that might identify an undercover law enforcement officer or informer
4. Notes, preliminary drafts, and internal communications concerning an employee, unless these items are used for any personnel decision

Any of these materials may still be disclosed to the employee, at the discretion of the records custodian.  The language in the fourth instance has recently been clarified through case law, and Dr. Frayda Bluestein has an excellent post looking at the implications of the case’s decision on the UNC School of Government’s local law blog.

As North Carolina government employees, we are the custodians of the public records in our offices.  While we are responsible for their maintenance, public records are public property. While we encourage offices to find places to store records that do not take up too much valuable office space, the selected space should be dry, secured, and free from pests and mold. Your office must ensure that records stored away from your main office area are well protected from natural and man-made problems, while remaining readily available to your staff and the public. General Statute 132-7 advises:

Insofar as possible, custodians of public records shall keep them in fireproof safes, vaults, or rooms fitted with noncombustible materials and in such arrangement as to be easily accessible for convenient use. All public records should be kept in the buildings in which they are ordinarily used…

I am often asked what all that means in terms of temperature and relative humidity, “What are we supposed to tell our HVAC folks?”  Recently, I found an old handout in my office that breaks it down for those mathematically inclined:

For more fleshed out guidance on national and international standards for records storage environments, check out these Northeast Document Conservation Center pamphlets:

Temperature, Relative Humidity, Light, and Air Quality: Basic Guidelines for Preservation

Low Cost/No Cost Improvements in Climate Control

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the fact that we are shifting records in the archives stacks. This project allows  us to provide more materials in the search room as well as leave some space for future collections.   We shift records on Monday since the Search Room is closed. We are almost done. We only need to shift  Alamance – Gaston counties. I could not be more excited. I will keep you updated.