Lawyers, managers, end-users and e-mail classification at the Texas Railroad Commission
Patricia Galloway
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Texas-Austin
Abstract
This paper will discuss experiences of including stakeholder participation in introducing automated recordkeeping elements into existing systems, by describing the negotiations and planning process that Galloway and project partner Susan Cisco and a cast of thousands have used in working with the Railroad Commission of Texas and other elements of Texas state government to manage e-mail. Initial steps included using participatory methods to support the planning of an e-mail management and classification system to be integrated into the Novell GroupWise system used by the Railroad Commission of Texas, for the preparation of a grant proposal. When that initial plan failed, and in the face of increased anxiousness about e-record management after 9/11 and the Enron/Anderson debacle, the partners were approached by the Texas Department of Information Resources to look at the possibilities for developing an e-mail repository for all of Texas state government, which through a full implementation that would also handle a full range of attachments, would additionally serve as a proof of concept project for the digital management of all born-digital records. This new but connected project is ongoing, signaling an expanded consensus-building phase.
Original RRC project
In the fall of 2000 I began employment in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UT-Austin, with the mandate of creating a series of courses on electronic records, emphasizing the creation, management, and archiving of born-digital records. Literally two days after my arrival in Texas I found myself testifying before a meeting of the Records Management Interagency Coordinating Council in the state capitol building addressing the desirability of the management of electronic records. As I began to design my courses, I also initiated a partnership with a full-time records manager at the Railroad Commission of Texas, Dr. Susan Cisco, an ARMA Fellow who also teaches records management as an adjunct at GSLIS. Susan and I, together with Martha Richardson, a graduate of GSLIS who now serves as records officer for the Texas Department of Information Resources, began to plan for a research proposal to the E-Government initiative of the National Science Foundation, concentrating on the management of e-mail at the Railroad Commission.
Why e-mail? Chiefly because it is not only peskily growing daily in volume; but since it is a distinctively e-genre that does its work in electronic form and must be exchanged in the process, it is also governed by a universal standard that must of necessity be obeyed by all messaging systems at some point if they wish to exchange messages over the Internet at all. Hence the structure of e-mail messages is well-understood and its growing bulk is alarming enough to demand prompt attention. Further, for these very same reasons several projects carried out under NARA’s aegis already exist that have provided useful lessons learned and even more useful and usable system configurations and best practices. Finally, because e-mail is so easy to use and so ubiquitous, state agencies are finding that the public is eager to transact business with them via e-mail, and the Railroad Commission is no exception: employees there had made a study of regulatory tasks that could be automated via e-mail messages and had discovered over 40 applications that could potentially be implemented—if e-mail could be adequately managed to qualify as records reliably made in the normal course of business.
Our goal, then, was to create a fundable project that would permit us to carry out such management—to capture e-mail messages, classify them to fit appropriate records series retention schedules, and support their retention for as long as required—in some cases, forever. In addition, we also wanted to look at the behaviors of both records managers and records creators in classifying e-mail and to discover what information already at hand would make it possible to move toward automatic classification that could satisfy statutory requirements.
Stakeholders and quid pro quos
If our project were to have any success, we would have to bring together many elements. First, we had to satisfy a requirement for academic excellence and for what would be expected of a fundable project. The project proposal would have to outline a project that had the full partnership of government and academe. For the major participants, Dr. Cisco and me, the project should ideally provide rewardable accomplishments that also coincided with our research interests. We needed to find another partner to provide convincing expertise in the area of text processing that would be vital to achieving any kind of automatic classificatory process. Accordingly, we added Dr. Mary Dee Harris, then teaching as an adjunct in the Computer Science Department and consulting on text analysis, and one of the experts in the field. She saw the project as providing challenging real-world research opportunities for computer science students.
The project would be taking place, however, in a larger Texas state government environment. Among myriad departments, boards, and commissions, several, brought together in the activities of the RMICC group, stood out for their particular concerns with recordkeeping. The Texas State Library and Archives Commission, responsible for administering recordkeeping law in Texas and providing records management and archival services to state agencies, has taken initiatives in organizing digital government documents and promulgating guidelines for electronic records management, but so far has not moved to propose managing a digital repository itself. The Department of Information Resources, the centralized technology agency of Texas state government responsible for the orderly and effective implementation of computing technology, is led by a well-known and innovative CIO who is experienced in using her national clout to find industry partnerships for carrying out projects that the legislature fails to fund. The Office of the Attorney General, responsible for both the administration of Texas Open Records legislation and for the protection of citizen privacy mandated as part of that legislation, is paying special attention to public access issues as the AG is expected to run for high office.
Within each agency there would be other stakeholders, and the Railroad Commission, which is responsible not only for the regulation of railroads in Texas, but for that of the energy industry that at first made use of railroad lands and transportation, was no exception. Its legal staff would have to be satisfied that records were not made available in such a way that either the law or the concerns of the agency were violated. Its IT managers and staff would require that their workload not be added to and that their servers might be relieved of the burden of some of the mounting pile of e-mail. The line managers and workers themselves would want a result that enabled them to work better and faster without piling on a huge educational burden. We knew all these general facts before we started any detailed work, but we also knew that it would be vital to assume nothing: we would need to meet with all these stakeholders directly, not only to discuss our project but to hear the ideas, hopes, and objections that they would have to offer.
Meetings and presentations
Galloway’s presentation to RMICC had garnered their encouragement for the project. The original partners, Galloway, Cisco, and Richardson, began meeting in the fall of 2000 on a monthly basis, thinking through issues on e-mail management especially at the Railroad Commission, but also considering the interests of the Department of Information Resources in regularizing the treatment of e-mail, using the Railroad Commission as a model. We were fortunate in that Cisco had worked very hard to make the RRC one of the best-managed records environments in Texas state government, and had secured a high profile for recordkeeping in general with her work. Furthermore, the TSLAC had completed its periodic review of the RRC records schedule, so the records schedule for paper records that might be displaced by e-mail applications was completely up to date. As we discussed the issues at hand and the problems at the RRC that we would attempt to address, a focus for the project emerged: we would seek a solution to several problems in the management of RRC e-mail:
1) how to diminish the bulk of e-mail on central agency servers
2) how to manage e-mail records replicated in an undisciplined way through a networked environment
3) how to classify e-mail records into records series and thereby determine their longevity
4) how to fit an effective solution into existing work routines without unduly burdening employees
From the beginning we determined that we would seek the input of stakeholders from inside and outside the RRC, and Cisco had begun to discuss possible ideas with her superior and with IS and legal staff and other line managers at the RRC. To this end, beginning in early 2001, we held several formal meetings, initially with a large group composed of RRC, TSLAC, DIR, and OAG representatives, to explain our thinking for the project and get feedback from our initial stab at a proposal and budget. Then we met separately on issues of special interest with RRC legal counsel and IT management, and with archives and records management personnel from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC). We presented our ideas about classification and management and discussed the many-faceted needs that e-mail elicited from each of these groups.
1/5/2001 / “E-Mail Summit”: Description of proposal outline for feedback2/2/2001 / Meeting with RRC legal counsel
2/9/2001 / Meeting with TSLAC archivists to discuss model e-mail policy
2/13/2001 / Working meeting with TSLAC archives director
2/20/2001 / Working meeting with RRC IT manager
3/9/2001 / Working meeting with TSLAC records managers and archivists to discuss classification
4/13/2001 / Meeting with DIR GroupWise manager
4/20/2001 / Working meeting with line supervisors of end-users to be involved in pilot
4/30/2001 / RRC and DIR IT staffs confer on e-mail and GroupWise
All these meetings helped to sharpen our focus and allowed us to begin to specify an implementation and its costs. Several problems arose that became part of the project:
1) Solving the problem of a proprietary messaging system—in this case, GroupWise, which was used not only by the RRC but also by DIR—that retained messages in a proprietary format; converting from this format was possible using system tools, but doing it simply by message redirection for internal records would require custom programming.
2) Avoiding disruption of production systems at RRC and potentially being able to weather a change in systems away from GroupWise; RRC would also need some kind of repository solution for its permanently valuable e-mail records.
3) Dealing with specific privacy issues (Texas had passed a law requiring that citizens’ e-mail addresses be kept private) and thereby addressing issues of access restriction and redaction in such a way as to meet legal requirements without unduly alarming elected officials.
4) Providing an automation quid pro quo that was very much desired by one segment of the RRC, which was experiencing demands from its clientele for communicating officially by e-mail.
5) Not requiring TSLAC to take custody of archival e-mail, while providing it with cost figures and lessons learned to facilitate a possible repository plan.
6) Ideally, not requiring records creators to do classification explicitly from the desktop.
This was the kind of reality check that we needed, but it quickly became obvious that every concern we addressed would require an increase in the cost of the project.
Cisco had been working on a survey of e-mail use and best practices in the petroleum and utilities industries that she presented at the spring ARMA meeting, and early in May she convened a workshop to discuss the results of the survey, attended by oil and gas industry records managers and document management system vendors. Discussions at this workshop provided useful ideas about the nuts and bolts of implementation and made it clear that nobody has a very good handle on the amount or kind of e-mail traffic.
Meanwhile, Galloway began to plan the systematic investigation of specific issues in her spring classes. E-mail metadata was addressed as an overall class project in the class “Metadata,” where the class began with an RFC822 metadata core and a records-continuum model and produced a metadata set for e-mail covering creation to archival preservation. Modeling the computing environment for retention of e-mail was tackled in the class on “Digital Preservation,” where class members followed the OAIS model and used the metadata set developed by the other class to deconstruct e-mail messages captured on the class server and attempt a partial implementation of the ingest process for SIPs, the loading of AIPs into a database together with additional metadata from the SIP agreement, and the retrieval of DIPs using a Web-based interface.
Grant Proposal
The core project team met weekly throughout the spring semester to work on the grant proposal. The following executive summary outlines the project we proposed and submitted on July 11, 2001:
The Texas Records Management Interagency Coordinating Council (RMICC), composed of representatives of seven state agencies with direct authority over Texas state government's management of its records, is charged with proposing and implementing improvements to Texas state records management. In 1999 RMICC determined that the dramatic expansion of the volume of e-mail in Texas state government, together with the demand from businesses and citizens to transact business with state government via e-mail, was raising a serious records management problem. Accordingly, RMICC sought an agency willing to serve as a testbed for investigating a suitable implementation of lawful e-mail management sufficient to support planned moves to e-government and official electronic transactions.