E-mail policies

Regarding your March 20 editorial "A handle on e-mail":

We are state employees. Each morning we arrive at UNC-Chapel Hill to find inboxes full of e-mails that have no administrative value: informational e-mails sent to all university employees, listserv e-mails and e-mails labeled junk. Deleting these e-mails allows us to do our jobs more efficiently and helps us identify records with administrative value.

All records created or received by state employees are public records and should be open to inspection unless confidentiality restrictions apply. The Public Records Act allows destruction of records with permission from the Department of Cultural Resources. That permission is given through approved records retention and disposition schedules that tell us whether, and for how long, our records should be retained. There should be more than personal whim guiding decisions to delete public records, including e-mail.

E-mail is simply a vehicle; legal, evidential or administrative content dictates the length of retention. We expect university employees to manage their own e-mail, and we offer training focused specifically on e-mail management. DCR offers similar training to all state employees.

Is it feasible to preserve every e-mail created or received by state employees? We think not, and we suspect our IT staff would agree.

Caroline Walters

University records manager

Janis Holder

University archivist, UNC-CH Chapel Hill