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RAIN 04/06: E-mail gone awry, technology advances, fading archive s, mold and FOIA



Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 04/05/01
Federal judge to rule on colleague's authority
http://www.ardemgaz.com/week/Thu/ark/B1xorder5.html

by Jim Brooks
A federal judge in Little Rock will decide today whether a magistrate judge
acted within his authority when he ruled that federal search warrants should
remain open and not automatically closed to the public.
In the Eastern District of Arkansas, Amended General Order No. 22 had
required search and seizure warrants, as well as related documents, to be
sealed -- even after the warrants are served.
Responding to an Arkansas Democrat-Gazette request for documents pertaining
to the raid of Carl Wilson, Magistrate Judge J. Thomas Ray declared in March
that sealing the information was unconstitutional.
Wilson of Mayflower was killed in a January shootout when authorities tried
to serve a warrant.





Bryan-College Station Eagle 4/05/01
Grimes office mold may be causing illness
http://www.theeagle.com/region/localregional/040501grimesmold.htm

by Colleen Kavanagh
ANDERSON - The Grimes County Commissioners Court decided Wednesday to hire
an inspector to determine whether mold is harming the health of employees in
the district and county clerk offices.
The commissioners convened an emergency meeting after District Clerk Wayne
Rucker threatened to close his office - which was recently relocated to the
county's old jail building - because the musty storage rooms were making
employees sick.



Cincinnati Enquirer 4/05/01
Dispute growing over mold at Sharonville grade school
http://enquirer.com/editions/2001/04/05/loc_dispute_growing_over.html

by Michael D. Clark
SHARONVILLE - Parents and teachers claim mold has sickened children at a
Princeton grade school and that district officials knew of the potential
health hazard for nearly a year before recently taking action.
Documents obtained by the Enquirer show that Princeton City School officials
knew during spring 2000 of possible mold problems from water-damaged carpet
in Robert E. Lucas Intermediate School.



Daily Southtown 04/05/01
House Oks plan to strengthen information law
http://www.dailysouthtown.com/southtown/dsnews/053nd4.htm

by Christopher Wills
Associated Press
SPRINGFIELD - The Illinois House voted unanimously Wednesday for a plan to
strengthen the state public-information law. Now it faces the hostile
terrain of the state Senate.
The measure would let the attorney general issue advisory opinions on
disputes over public access to government documents. It also would make it
easier for people to recover legal costs if they successfully sue for
access.




Government Executive 3/28/01
National Archives working to preserve federal Web sites
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0301/032801m1.htm

by Kellie Lunney
The National Archives and Records Administration will work closely with
federal agencies on preserving federal Web sites through changing
presidential administrations, the deputy archivist of the United States said
Tuesday.
In a January memo, Lewis Bellardo, deputy archivist of the United States,
ordered agencies to hand over electronic records showing what their publicly
available Web site pages looked like before the transition from the Clinton
administration to the Bush administration. The move is part of NARA's
ongoing effort to preserve for posterity the online presence of every
presidential administration from Clinton onward, he said.




Huntsville Times 4/05/01
Judge wants to make county records accessible under one roof at library
http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/?Apr2001/4-e14577.html

by Steve Doyle
Fading ink the color of dried blood tells the sad story of a Huntsville man
committed to Bryce Insane Hospital in 1899 because of "an uncontrollable
desire for whiskey and rambling about."
Turn the page and read about the 16-year-old consigned to a padded room
because he talked too much about sex, a taboo subject during the prudish
Victorian era.
It's all here - good, bad and ugly stories involving Huntsville's earliest
residents - in leather-bound chancery court and circuit court records tucked
out of sight on the third floor of the Huntsville-Madison County Public
Library on Monroe Street.




Kansas City Star 04/05/01
Plan to help motor-vehicle offices goes to JOCO Commission
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/local.pat,local/37754137.404,.html

by Finn Bullers
Hoping to wipe out long lines and hot tempers at the Department of Motor
Vehicles this summer, Johnson County commissioners will consider a plan
today to add eight new jobs and restructure work duties at the beleaguered
offices.
Since July, when frustration surfaced over long waits to license vehicles, a
team of county staffers spent 50 days observing operations and interviewing
employees in the Motor Vehicles Department.




NPR Morning Edition 04/04/01
The Medici Archives
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/2001/apr/010406.medici.html

If you think that emptying out your internet mailbox is a chore, take a
moment to commiserate with Dr. Edward Goldberg, the president and project
director of the Medici Archive Project in Florence, Italy. Dr. Goldberg
spends his time sorting through nearly three million letters -- filling more
than half a mile of shelf space -- written over the course of two centuries.
These letters form the bulk of a unique archive that recounts the rule of
Italy's Medici family, the Grand Dukes and Duchesses of Tuscany.




New York Times 4/5/01
A stinging office memo boomerangs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/technology/05TECH-MEMO.html

by Edward Wong
The only things missing from the office memo were expletives. It had
everything else. There were lines berating employees for not caring about
the company. There were words in all capital letters like "SICK" and "NO
LONGER." There were threats of layoffs and hiring freezes and a shutdown of
the employee gym.
The memo was sent by e-mail on March 13 by the chief executive of the Cerner
Corporation, a health care software development company based in Kansas
City, Mo., with 3,100 employees worldwide. Originally intended only for 400
or so company managers, it quickly took on a life of its own.




New York Times 4/5/01
Departing Harvard Leader to organize digital art
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/technology/05MELL.html?searchpv=nytToday

by Karen W. Arenson
When Neil L. Rudenstine steps down as president of Harvard University in
June, he will lead a new project to create a giant digital collection of
images of art, architecture and other objects, ranging from cave paintings
in the Gobi desert to design items in the Museum of Modern Art, the
university will announce today.
Mr. Rudenstine said the aim was to create a kind of "public utility" for art
that would present high quality images, catalog them and link them to
scholarly information.




New York Times 4/5/01
In the Storage Race, Will consumers win?
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/technology/05STORR.html

by Michel Marriott
CRADLED in a hand, the shiny disc, encased in a sliver of clear plastic
roughly the size of a half-dollar, suggests an artifact left behind by some
flying saucer.
But the disc is the chief product of a two-year-old company called DataPlay,
based in Boulder, Colo. The optical discs, known as DataPlay digital media,
can store up to 500 megabytes of data, almost as much as a standard compact
disc. The company plans to start selling them later this year for about $10
apiece. It hopes that the discs will become more commonplace than CD's,
finding their way into an ever-expanding world of digital music players,
digital cameras and camcorders, personal organizers, e- book readers and the
like.




New York Times 4/5/01
New rules for net searches: Location, location, location
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/technology/05NEXT.html

by Catherine Greenman
One of the great advantages of cyberspace is that it isn't hampered by
physical space. On the Internet, someone halfway around the world is just as
accessible as the person in the next cubicle.
That is also one of the small drawbacks of cyberspace. It is possible to
find local services like movie theaters and car dealers on the Internet by
typing your ZIP code into a search box on many Web sites. But the success of
these searches depends on the indexing capabilities of the particular search
engine, in addition to how well the site has been registered, two factors
that can vary a great deal. It may be easy to find Web sites for museums in
Florence, Italy, but shouldn't it be just as easy to find out what time the
hardware store down the street closes?




New York Times 4/5/01
Putting those prized memories on something more lasting
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/technology/05GEE2.html

by Adam Baer
As if home archivists don't already have enough to do, TeraOptix's Terapin
audio and video CD recorder has put another intriguing road on the
entertainment map.
The Terapin is a sleek device that can write 74 minutes' worth of video with
audio (or audio alone) onto blank CD's.




New York Times 4/5/01
Stranded D.S.L. Customers weigh options
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/technology/05NORT.html

by Catherine Greenman
LORI WESTIN, the manager of Oasis Family Practice in Denver, has weathered
her share of headaches while coordinating her medical office's high-speed
Internet service, but the past few days have been especially trying.
Her service provider, HSA, relied on NorthPoint Communications for digital
subscriber line, or D.S.L., service. And last week NorthPoint, in
bankruptcy, said it was shutting down. Oasis was left without Internet
access, and without access to its patient schedules, which were online.




Oklahoma Daily 4/5/01
Online enrollment causes U. Oklahoma system slowdown
http://news.excite.com/news/uw/010404/tech-32

by Ty McMahan
(U-WIRE) NORMAN, Okla. -- The University of Oklahoma's new online enrollment
system was designed to speed up the enrollment process but Honors College
students who enrolled Monday found the system more difficult than they
expected.
Servers for the enrollment system became overwhelmed with the number of
students trying to enroll Monday, slowing them down considerably, Susie
Skaggs, project manager for enterprise solutions in the office of
information technology said.




Baltimore Sun 3/27/01
Records bill withdrawn in Assembly
Sponsor takes action after heavy opposition at first House hearing; 'A
complete misread', Proponents sought public access law fix; more study
suggested
http://www.sunspot.net/news/local/bal-md.records27mar27.story

by Howard Libit
In the face of stiff opposition, an effort by the press and government
officials to clarify Maryland's public-records law was withdrawn from the
General Assembly yesterday, hours after its initial House of Delegates
hearing.
The bills had sought to fix existing laws to end some common abuses and to
create a task force on whether the state needs a public information
ombudsman to mediate complaints. The legislation was prompted by a newspaper
group survey last summer showing that bureaucrats across Maryland were
routinely denying citizens access to public records.




Yahoo News 4/5/01
FBI said to be looking into PolyMedica's Medicare billing practices
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/street/20010402/bs/fbi_said_to_be_looking_into_
polymedica_s_medicare_billing_practices_1.html

by Mark Martinez
Metrics Editor
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into PolyMedica's (Nasdaq:
PLMD - news) Medicare billing practices, according to one former employee
who was interviewed by an agent last week.
FBI officials declined to confirm or deny that an inquiry is under way.
PolyMedica officials say the company hasn't been contacted by any government
agency over its billing practices and has done nothing wrong.




Baltimore Sun 4/5/01
Sensitive documents were destroyed after Milosevic
http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/sns-milosevic.story?coll=sns%2Dnewsn
ation%2Dheadlines

by David Holley
Los Angeles Times
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- After the fall of former Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic, but while his former secret police chief remained in office, tons
of police documents were destroyed and illegal copies of files on former
opposition leaders were spirited away, Serbian Interior Minister Dusan
Mihajlovic said Thursday.
"The period from Oct. 5 until Jan. 25 was used for the active destruction of
evidence," Mihajlovic told a session of the Serbian parliament's Defense and
Security Committee. "In our ministry, tons and tons of materials were
destroyed."




The Hindu 4/5/01
Relics of history are fading away
http://www.the-hindu.com/stories/14062182.htm

by Prashant Pandey
NEW DELHI, APRIL 5. They are the first records in black and white -- nay,
black and yellow -- of events that shaped the country's destiny one way or
the other. Written in chaste police Urdu jargon, these are First Information
Reports now lying in various stages of wear and tear in the record rooms of
police stations across Delhi.
One such FIR, lying at the Parliament Street police station, relates to the
case in which Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt threw a bomb inside the
Delhi Assembly and fired twice in the air before courting arrest in 1929.




Indianapolis Star 4/5/01
Senate president supports exemption from disclosure law
http://www.starnews.com/data/wire/out/0405ap_l34eki8009.html

Associated Press
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- The president of the Indiana Senate says he is prepared
to support a bill that would exempt the General Assembly from the state's
disclosure law, potentially allowing lawmakers to make their own rules for
releasing public records.
The Senate Government and Regulatory Affairs Committee voted Wednesday to
endorse legislation that would permit lawmakers to decide for themselves
whether records are public or secret.




Indianapolis Star 4/5/01
Senate panel votes to exempt lawmakers from Indiana's disclosure
http://www.starnews.com/data/wire/out/0405ap_l34bhp5009.html

Associated Press
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) -- An Indiana Senate panel has voted to exempt the General
Assembly from the state's disclosure law, a move that would limit lawmakers
from public scrutiny.
Wednesday's unanimous vote by the Senate Government and Regulatory Affairs
Committee means lawmakers would make their own rules on which records are
public and which are secret.






Peter A. Kurilecz CRM, CA
Manager, Records Management Group
Woodside Summit Group Inc
Midlothian, Virginia
Office: 804-744-1247 x23
Fax: 804-744-4947
mailto:peter.kurilecz@woodsidesummitgroup.com

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