Well, that was fast.
I just wrapped up a tour at a small federal agency, and was happily enduring my final ethics briefing covering all matters of my separation. I had no plans to lobby my former agency, so I figured this would be simple enough. And then the subject turned to government records.
I was told by our ethics officer that all "government records" that I had generated during my tenure needed to be filed and stored for posterity -- fair enough.
But then I was next told that our agency was incapable of storing electronic records, including emails. Any email or outlook appointment that touched on a matter of policy was considered a government record, and would have to be printed, filed, and boxed in an orderly fashion.
I started doing the math. I had roughly 140,000 messages stored in my sent and received folders, only a handful of which had seemed important enough to print and file. Wading through them to decide which to print would take months. Printing them all would be incredibly wasteful... a ballpark estimate was half a million pages, which is staggeringly expensive. They would have filled over one hundred filing boxes.
All of this expense, not to mention environmental mayhem, could have been spared if I had simply been allowed to burn a DVD with all my emails on it, which, by the way, would have created a searchable database far more valuable to historians, muckraking journalists, etc.
I'd be curious to know if this is government-wide, or if my former agency was uniquely in the dark ages.
By the way, do you offer advice? I was really torn by this predicament.
