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U. Colorado students struggle with open records law



This article posted by Peter Kurilecz (Thanks Peter!), opens a couple
of  fascinating questions for C+U archivists and others.

For one, the university here asserts that for reasons of student
confidentiality (presumably FERPA) they won't open  to a student journalist
another student's emails that were created in the course of his role in
student government.  I always believed FERPA was designed to shield
institutional records about a student from disclosure.  Should one not
argue that the student's emails as an officer in a student organization
were in fact part of the institutional record that would be subject to the
state's open records law?  Student organizations are generally funded and
controlled to some extent by the institution. Certainly their actions
involve the liability of the institution -- I would see them as
instrumentalities of the university.  I would also assume that the
student's personal email would remain private -- not necessarily because of
FERPA though.

Also, what do the FOIA-experienced folks think of the suggestion that the
student making an open records request has to pay some cost for the
retrieval  of the records, as opposed to just paying the cost of making
copies?   In this case, the requesting person didn't want copies, he just
wanted to see the records and the student government rep said he spent
several hours to supply around 100 email messages (which the University
subsequently decided not to provide to the requestor).

Unfortunately I am not familiar with Colorado open records laws, so these
answers may be covered there.

Lee Stout


Colorado Daily 5/23/00
U. Colorado students struggle with open records law
http://news.excite.com/news/uw/000523/university-17

by Amanda Hill
(U-WIRE) BOULDER, Colo. -- Two University of Colorado - Boulder students
have recently run into problems while requesting records from the university
under the Colorado Open Records Act. One calls it stonewalling, the other
says it's a double standard.
"Once again, the university is attempting to stonewall our requests for
public records," said Shannon Meadors, the founder of Gravy.


  *********************************************************
  Lee Stout, Penn State University Archivist ---- ljs@psulias.psu.edu
  104 Paterno Library, University Park, PA 16802
  Voice:  (814) 865-7931 ----- Fax:  (814) 863-5318
  ***********************************************************

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