[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

RAIN 11/07: e-mail and electronic records



Saturday Night 11/04/00
Broken Records
http://www.saturdaynight.ca/articles/topstory2.asp

by Siobhan Roberts
Millions of precious photographs, letters, documents, and files sit in the
National Archives. The pile is growing, but already, parts of it are falling
apart. Is this the future of Canada's past?

One day in the spring of 1990, a crowd was milling about by a third-fioor
office in the West Memorial Building in Canada's National Archives complex,
which sits along a strip mall of national institutions ? Parliament Hill, the
Confederation Building, the Department of Justice, the Supreme Court ? on the
west end of Ottawa's Wellington Street. The archivists were peering over one
another's shoulders at a New York Times article taped to the office door. The
headline read, "Lost on Earth: Wealth of Data Found in Space." The
accompanying photograph showed a storage room stacked with rows and rows of
steel-canistered computer tapes, and a prim-looking woman sitting at a table,
cataloguing the tapes, one at a time, with a pencil. Why, these archivists
wondered, was nasa, with its reputation for cutting-edge technology, sorting
through data using such crude nineteenth-century methods?


The Standard 10/23/00
Bad Signs
Digital signatures are now lawful. That doesn't make them lawful
http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,19485,00.html

By Bruce Schneier
When first invented in the 1970s, digital signatures held amazing promise:
better than a handwritten signature, unforgeable and uncopyable. Today, they
are a fundamental part of business in cyberspace, and numerous state laws
have codified their authority. On June 30, President Clinton signed the
Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-Sign Act), which
made digital signatures equivalent to written signatures for all electronic
documents.
These laws are a mistake. Digital signatures are not signatures, and they
will never fulfill their promise. It helps to understand how they work.


The Sun Herald 11/06/00
Supervisors may vote to upgrade system
http://vh60009.vh6.infi.net/region/docs/system110600.htm

by Karen Nelson
PASCAGOULA - Workers in the Jackson County Chancery Clerk's office are still
dealing with land records manually, even though the county has a $3.2 million
computerized system designed to handle the transactions at lightning speed.
And even if the county Board of Supervisors votes today to buy equipment that
will help get the system online, it will still take another four to five
months to get it functioning, county officials have said.
Board President Manly Barton said last week that he's fairly certain the
board will vote to buy some of the equipment the system needs. "We've already
voted to get that project on track again," Barton said. "It has been four or
five years since the project got stopped. A lot of equipment and software is
different."
But since the county has waited this long, supervisors say they might as well
get the latest in prices from the state bid lists that will be updated next
week. District 4 Supervisor Frank Leach wants to ensure the county gets the
best prices for the right equipment.


CNN.com 11/06/00
Chicago museum returns borrowed books - 92 years late
http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/11/06/late.books.ap/index.html

Associated Press
CHICAGO (AP) -- Talk about overdue books. The Field Museum of Natural History
recently returned 10 volumes to the American Museum of Natural History in New
York -- 92 years late.
It seems a researcher from the New York museum took the books with him when
he accepted a job at the Field Museum in 1908. American Museum officials
suspect anthropologist Bertholt Laufer was using the books for research when
he was hired away.


Boston Globe 11/6/00
BC Students find hard evidence
Vatican did denounce novel by Greene
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/311/metro/BC_students_find_hard_evidence+.sh

tml

by Michael Paulson
The Rev. Stephen Schloesser was teaching a class on the 20th century Catholic
imagination when he had a brainstorm - why not let his Boston College
students, who were reading ''The Power and the Glory,'' take a peek at the
papers of the book's author, Graham Greene?
So Schloesser called up BC's rare books library, which five years ago
acquired Greene's 60,000-item collection, and asked the librarian to send
along the files on the novel.



The Advocate 11/05/00
All the safety you'll never need
http://www.theadvocate.com/business/technobabble.asp?StoryID=2723

by Jared Kendall
At first glance, online safe deposit boxes seem like a logical service for
banks to provide. Fleet is the largest of the banks to roll out such a
digital safe deposit system, and more will follow. Safe deposit boxes have
long been a way for banks to earn income based on their reputation for
security and integrity. Why not sell an online product based on the same
niche?
For one thing, it isn't really the same niche. It just looks like the same
niche.
Comparing electronic documents to paper documents simply because we now have
a federal law that allows digitally signed documents to be legally binding
would be like comparing a Ferrari with a Yugo simply because they're both
street legal.



Digital Missourian 11/06/00
Talent campaign reaches state workers via government e-mail
http://digmo.org/news/local/premium/1106local3669.html

by Scott Charton
Associated Press
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- In an e-mail sent Thursday to thousands of
Missouri government employees, the campaign manager for Republican Jim Talent
said ``state workers have nothing to fear'' if his candidate is elected
governor.
Brad Scott, Talent's campaign chief, said it was appropriate to send a
political message through taxpayer-owned computers because ``It's a public
e-mail system.''
But Missouri's commissioner of administration, Dick Hanson, said such a
broadly distributed political e-mail was ``unprecedented, to my knowledge.''
Hanson said it is illegal for state workers to use publicly owned equipment
and time to promote candidates. But Hanson said a worker wouldn't be in
trouble for opening an unsolicited e-mail.



The News-Press 11/06/00
Politics discussed in FGCU e-mail
Whether professors' writings violate school policy is open to interpretation
http://www.news-press.com/news/today/001106email.html

by Alison Gerber
Florida Gulf Coast University's policy forbids any sort of political
campaigning on campus.
Yet as the election creeps closer, some faculty members have been exchanging
e-mails with political undertones.
"Florida will be close!" education professor Victoria Dimidjian wrote of the
presidential election. Dimidjian - also president of the FGCU chapter of the
United Faculty of Florida - listed the phone number for Democratic
headquarters in Fort Myers for those interested in volunteering.
But the only campaigning allowed on campus is for student and
university-related elections.



Yomiuri Shimbun 11/07/00
Govt to consider IC cards for storing nursing-care info
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/1107so13.htm

The Health and Welfare Ministry will consider the use of integrated-circuit
(IC) cards by local governments to store data on recipients of the services
in the nursing-care insurance program, it was learned Sunday.
Elderly people who receive nursing-care services currently must undergo
regular checkups every six months to determine what services they need, and
insurance documents are updated accordingly. However, the health of elderly
people tends to fluctuate, and data is frequently updated for insurance
purposes.



Star-Tribune 11/05/00
Tech watch: Computer forensics investigator has tedious, fascinating job
http://www2.startribune.com/stOnLine/cgi-bin/article?thisStory=82838345

Somebody hacked his way into the Pentagon and accessed top-secret documents,
threatening national security. Someone else broke through a bank's firewall
and moved a few million dollars into a Swiss bank account. Somebody else
fouled up the works of an e-commerce site by spamming it with e-mail so real
customers couldn't get through. A convicted murderer cleverly researched
killing techniques so he could kill his wife, and a child pornographer
secretly stored thousands of pornographic pictures of children on his
computer.
Sound far-fetched? Well, it's making headlines. It's also cyber-evidence,
which provides computer-forensics investigator Judd Robbins with more work
than he can handle.


Yomiuri Shimbun 11/07/00
Transcripts of prewar rulings to be preserved
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/1107so14.htm

Following the enforcement of a law last month, millions of original
transcripts of civil action rulings handed down before World War II will be
collected from the nation's universities and preserved at the National
Archives in Tokyo for public perusal, government sources said.
Legal scholars who called for the preservation of the materials welcomed the
government action, saying the transcripts have finally found a fitting
resting place.
However, as the newly enforced national archives law stipulates that only
materials that have value as "historical records" be preserved, some of those
concerned--including legal scholars--have started demanding that the original
transcripts of all prewar civil action rulings be preserved.





Peter A. Kurilecz CRM, CA
pakurilecz@aol.com
Richmond, Virginia

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>