Records/Archives in the News r990405a
There are 6 stories in this posting.

Boston Business Journal 4/5/99
Beacon Hill lobbying firm hit by departures

The Press (New Zealand) 4/3/99
Documents destroyed in suspicious fire

Binghampton Press (NY) 4/5/99
Let's hear it for the record-keepers

Washington Post 4/5/99
What You See Isn't Always What You Can Get

San Jose Mercury News 4/3/99
U.S., European Union clash over privacy laws

Washington Post 4/5/99
What Did the Appraiser Say, and When Did He Say It?


________________________________________________________________
Boston Business Journal 4/5/99
Beacon Hill lobbying firm hit by departures

Edward Mason   Journal Staff

It reads like a page torn from a John Grisham novel.

A well-known lobbying firm, Brandon Associates LLC, in a suit filed in
Suffolk Superior Court, is charging three former employees with sneaking into
the firm's Financial District offices one weekend night in February and
absconding with confidential documents and sensitive computer files in an
effort to cripple Brandon Associates.

The three men charged--William Cass, Jason J. Godin and Steven L.
Goldblatt--have denied any wrongdoing.
<SNIP>
<SNIP>
Documents filed in Suffolk Superior Court by Flanagan charged the three men
entered the firm on the final weekend of February and cleaned out the office
of confidential documents. They also allegedly copied proprietary documents
from the firm's computers, according to court documents.

Then, according to the suit, Cass, Godin and Goldblatt turned around and used
that information to lure several of Brandon Associates' clients to their new
firm, Suffolk Group LLC.

The new firm was registered with the Office of the Secretary of State on Feb.
26, four days before the men resigned from their jobs at Brandon Associates.

Both sides acknowledge that on the weekend of Feb. 27-28 Cass, Godin and
Goldblatt removed documents from Brandon Associates' Boston office.

What is disputed is the importance of what was taken. Flanagan's attorneys
claimed the men copied sensitive information from the company's computers,
including legislative reports and marketing letters.

In court documents, attorneys representing Cass and his colleagues said any
papers removed from the office were public documents, such as Statehouse
bills, that could have been obtained anywhere.

In a phone interview, Cass said he and his colleagues only removed personal
items.
<SNIP>
<SNIP>
However, according to documents filed by attorneys for Cass, Godin and
Goldblatt, the trio left because they "disagreed with certain personal and
business practices of Brandon and Flanagan."

Another reason for their departure, according to court documents, was that
"Flanagan had been telling (Godin and Goldblatt) for several months that
Brandon was losing money."

Flanagan said the defection has not hurt his firm. When asked why he is
pursuing his former employees in court, he declined to answer.
<SNIP>

_______________________________________________________________
The Press (New Zealand) 4/3/99
Documents destroyed in suspicious fire
<SNIP>
A fire in a Christchurch city storage facility has destroyed hundreds of
files on failed and obsolete companies.

The fire started about 6.15am yesterday in Horatio Street, Addington.
Detective Constable Corrie Parnell, of the central city investigations unit,
said the fire was being treated as suspicious.

Fire Safety officer Joe Hefford said firefighters had to force entry to the
secure building.

"There was very little structural damage but the inside was totally gutted,"
he said.

It took about 30 minutes to bring the fire under control. Firefighters were
at the scene until 1pm damping down smouldering files and shelves.

Companies Office manager Justin Hygate said the records related to "dead"
companies and obsolete records for current companies. All current records
were held in an office in the central city. The records were due to be
relocated to Wellington this week, he said.

All the very old documentation had already been filed in the national
archives. Mr Parnell would like to hear from anyone in the Horatio Street
area around 6am yesterday who noticed any suspicious activity.

There was also a spate of rubbish bin fires in the city overnight.
<SNIP>

_______________________________________________________________
Binghampton Press (NY) 4/5/99
Let's hear it for the record-keepers
This week puts focus on unsung business force

By MAURICE THOMAS
Business Writer
<SNIP>
At just 5 years old, National Records and Information Management Week isn't a
Hallmark holiday.

In the information age, the image of a record keeper as a stodgy codger
hunched over an oversized ledger is obsolete. Nearly every company and
municipality depends on reliable professionals to keep track of everything.

The week honoring these organized individuals, which runs today through
Saturday, is designed to raise awareness and educate others about the field
of records management, said Martha Westbrook, director of accounts and
information management at Rogers Service Group and president of the Central
New York chapter of the Association of Records Managers and Administrators.

Events and seminars are held across the country to focus on the latest trends
and products in records management, she said.

Records and information management week was started by the Association of
Records Managers and Administrators, a not-for-profit organization with about
10,000 members internationally.

Though information record managers in Broome County won't likely receive
greeting cards this week, they said they are glad attention is focused on
something that is usually taken for granted.

"Records management is an important service largely overlooked until
questions arise," said Jim Priestley, master scheduler at Ametek Aerospace in
Binghamton. The company makes aircraft cockpit gauges for companies including
Boeing and Cessna.

Federal Aviation Administration standards require that airline manufacturers
keep records on the parts they use for planes. Because Ametekis a supplier,
the company must also keep records of the parts they supply to aircraft
builders, Priestley said.

Documents are generated for each part manufactured and shipped, he said. The
records range between 10 and 90 pages and list the materials in the part, the
person who made and inspected the part, and its performance test.

Depending on the customer, those records must be kept anywhere from five to
10 years. The plant has space for about six months of records and other
materials are kept in a secure site by Rogers Service Group. Contracting with
an outside company frees up more time for the staff and more room for
manufacturing, Priestley said.

Rogers Service Group stores information for several local companies such as
Ametek, and the accounting firm Johnson Lauder & Savidge. The company can
retrieve documents and even destroy them according to a retention plan worked
out in the contract.

Sue DiBenedetto, records manager for Broome County, doesn't mind that she
probably won't get flowers during a week designated to recognize the
importance of her job.

DiBenedetto has been Broome County records manager for two and-a-half years.
Along with a clerk and an intern, she manages record for 29 Broome County
government departments.

The office microfilms or stores records for the Department of Social
Services, Board of Elections, Department of Finance and the office of the
County Clerk. In the inactive record files, there are are almost 7,000 cubic
feet of bound volumes, documents and maps, DiBenedetto said.

"I think we do a good job for a lot of departments," DiBenedetto said. But
one of the most rewarding aspects of the job is helping people researching
family recors.

"It is enjoyable to see people get excited when they find ancestors," she
said.

Not just 9 to 5
Records management is not just for the workplace.

"Records management is something everyone does, even without knowing it,"
said Paulette DeRado, office manager at Johnson Lauder & Savidge. Part of her
role at the Binghamton accounting firm is to deal with client and firm
records stored on paper, electronically and digitally. She tries to find the
most efficient and cost effective way to manage records both active and
inactive.

"Though it hasn't been labeled as such. We all handle records, personal
records, bills or documents in the workplace and home. It is more important
than people give it credit," she said.

DeRado said that she has learned that documents should be stored for more
than just regulatory reasons. Some documents may have historical value, or be
vital to the operation of a company.

The same principles behind business records management can also be applied to
personal records, Westbrook said.

People can contract with a service group, use a safety deposit box or
personal safe to keep personal documents secure, she said. They may ask a
close friend or relative to store records for them. There should be back-up
records if something happens to the place where the records are being stored,
she said.

Knowing which documents are needed to support certain claims or rights is
also important, Westbrook said.

For example, records that should be readily available include birth
certificates and tax returns. Appliance serial numbers, instruction manuals
and warranty information should also be kept secure, Westbrook said, as
should baby cribs and car seat documents. If there is product recall, knowing
the serial number can help determine if that appliance or tool was part of
the recall, she said. People can prove they are the original owners of the
product if it needs a replacement part.
<SNIP>

_________________________________________________________________
Washington Post 4/5/99
What You See Isn't Always What You Can Get

By Margot Williams
<SNIP>
When I find information on the Web, often I don't want to just read it. I
might want to search it, save a copy on my hard disk or add it to a private
archive I'm making. Or I may need to move everything into a spreadsheet or
database or copy a graph and paste it into a letter I'm writing.

These should all be options when information is available electronically.
Trouble is, the formats that Webmasters choose for the data they display
rules many of them out. Often I can't do much more than read information on
the screen.

It makes me nostalgic for the days before World Wide Web browsers featured
fancy table displays of data. Back then, sites often presented statistics in
forms that were compatible with popular spreadsheet and database
applications. Now, Web pages display tables created in hypertext markup
language (HTML) and often that means trouble.

So, I find myself learning more and more technical tricks to overcome this.
Let me share a few of them.

The District's Board of Elections and Ethics has posted useful listings of
names and phone numbers of all our elected Advisory Neighborhood Commission
representatives (www.dcboee.org).

I wanted to build my own mailing list for these officials using a
spreadsheet. But the board publishes the list in eight HTML tables; no plain
text file is posted on the site.

I figured that I would have to print the eight electronic lists and type the
names and numbers in myself. I was ready to give up. But The Washington
Post's database editor had a partial solution: It's possible, though tedious,
to extract information from HTML tables into a spreadsheet with Excel 97.

Here's what you do: Download the file and open it in Excel by pasting the Web
address into the file name box. Then clear away the existing Web formats for
the spreadsheet by going to the menu bar, choosing Edit, Clear, Formats. To
get grid lines into your sheet, choose Tools, Options, click on the View tab
and put a check in the Gridlines box.

After all that, you'll have to clean up the data to make it appear correctly
in columns and rows. I did this for each of the eight tables and then
combined them into one list. A hassle? Yes, but quicker than typing the
records in, and no typos. If I had my choice, though, the list would be
available both in the pretty HTML tables and in a plain old text file.

Another format that is proliferating widely across the Web is the portable
document format (.pdf) created with Adobe Acrobat software. You look at the
files using the Acrobat Reader, which is available free at www.adobe.com and
many other sites and is installed as a plug-in to Netscape or Explorer. You
can view and print documents and their graphics in crisp, clear pages.

Many government agencies and corporations are publishing documents and
reports in Acrobat on the Web; on the screen, they look exactly like the
paper versions and can truly represent the contents as the publisher
intended. From the IRS site, for instance, you can print perfect tax forms at
home for filing this month.

But it's difficult to extract information from Acrobat documents with the
Acrobat Reader.

So here's a tip: For this job, don't use Acrobat in its plug-in form, in
which documents open in a browser window -- you won't have the option of
selecting, copying and pasting text or tables to other applications. Instead,
launch Adobe Reader separately outside the browser.

First you download the document to your hard drive (click the right mouse
button while pointing to the link that leads to the document and 'Save As').
Then start Acrobat as a stand-alone application. Open the document you saved.
You'll be able to select text, copy and paste to a word processing document
or an Excel 97 spreadsheet, one page at a time.

There are full-blown versions of Acrobat that offer better data-extraction
features; the program also lets you create documents. Also, there are
third-party products like Aerial (www.ambia.com) and Redwing
(www.datawatch.com) that let you convert and extract more complex data from
.pdf files.

Many agencies, including the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, make their information available both in Acrobat format or HTML
and in easy-to-manipulate spreadsheet or database formats.

But others, like the FBI, are in effect limiting access to the data by
providing much of it solely in Acrobat. And some are scanning in "legacy"
documents -- the new euphemism for paper -- as images without going on to the
further step of optical character recognition. These documents are
electronic, but can only be viewed; neither search nor capture features are
available.

If there's digital data, I'd like to have the option to get it the way I need
it. Anyone listening out there?

Places to Go

For tools, tips, tricks, news and help with all things PDF, visit pdfzone.com
(www.pdfzone. com). Here's where you can find the home page of the Acrobat
PDF web ring, linking 30 related sites.

To find out about file formats, file extensions and what they mean, go to
Allison Zhang's "Multimedia File Formats on the Internet"
(www.lib.rochester.edu/ multimed/contents.htm) or Every File Format in the
World (www.whatis.com/ff.htm).
<SNIP>

_________________________________________________________________
San Jose Mercury News 4/3/99
U.S., European Union clash over privacy laws

BY CAROL J. WILLIAMS
Los Angeles Times
<SNIP>
KIEL, Germany -- The White House is battling the European Union over privacy
laws, but President Clinton might secretly sympathize with his opponents: If
Linda Tripp had clandestinely taped conversations with Monica Lewinsky in
Germany, she would have been charged immediately with criminal violation of
her colleague's privacy.

Recording any conversation without the participants' permission is always
illegal here and strictly enforced. Privacy laws also obstruct unsolicited
marketing phone calls, prohibit any record on monthly telephone bills of
citizen contacts with counseling services and forbid the sharing of client
profiles via the Internet.

German model

Germany has some of the strongest privacy-protection laws in the world, and
they served as the model for the EU standards that the U.S. government
contends unfairly restrict U.S. companies seeking information about consumers
or even getting records from European partners. But the privacy watchdogs
with the grass-roots Data Security Association based in this Baltic Sea port
insist they occupy the moral high ground.

Because of the Nazi history of misusing personal records to identify
``undesirables,'' Germans are more wary than Americans of assaults on their
privacy. The specter of what Germans call ``the glass man,'' exposed to the
prying eyes of government and commerce, scares those on this densely
populated continent into clinging to the shields that U.S. officials contend
constrict free markets.

``For many years, the fear was that Big Brother could be watching our
behavior too closely, but now people have to be more worried about misuse of
their data by private entities, like businesses,'' says Thilo Weichert, a
Kiel resident who heads the Data Security Association, which works with
German agencies to propose privacy legislation.

At issue between the United States and Europe is an EU ban on electronic
transmission of personal data to countries -- including the United States --
that have less-stringent controls on use of that information. Credit-card
records and other indicators of buying habits may be fair game for marketing
agencies in the United States, but Germans are empowered by law to shield
their profiles and billing details from third parties.

The EU ban on such Internet transmissions is the subject of ongoing
negotiations between Washington and the Brussels, Belgium-based trade bloc,
but the German architects of the EU policy doubt a compromise is near because
of the fundamental conflict in views: Europeans prefer laws while Americans
favor self-regulation.

Reaction to abuses

Germany's extensive protections have often stemmed from cases of abuse. A law
prohibiting retention or disclosure of rental records was enacted after a
federal judge was exposed for patronizing a video pornography shop.

In EU nations, according to the new privacy code adopted last fall, a
business must inform clients of any secondary use of their personal
information and allow them the option of refusing. Europeans also can inspect
computer files on their credit ratings, personal history and health records.
As Deutsche Telekom privacy trouble-shooter Thomas Koenigshofen notes, the
telephone company's billing computers are programmed to omit records of calls
to abortion counselors, sexual-assault hotlines and AIDS-testing services, to
prevent even a client's family members from learning personal secrets.

Opposing views

Some political activists argue the protections can be excessive, thwarting
police in tracking down crime suspects through phone records or preventing
medical practitioners from learning vital aspects of a patient's history.

``In the age of the Internet, it is an illusion to believe protection can be
legislated,'' says Detlef Parr, a member of parliament from the Free
Democratic Party, a lone voice for less regulation.

German and EU officials insist their approach to privacy is superior,
especially in enforcement. State privacy watchdogs intervene to resolve at
least 80 percent of complaints about official or commercial abuses, sparing
citizens protracted and costly lawsuits, says Helmut Baeumler, chief of the
privacy protection office in Kiel, the capital of Schleswig-Holstein state.
<SNIP>

__________________________________________________________________
Washington Post 4/5/99
What Did the Appraiser Say, and When Did He Say It?

By David Segal
<SNIP>
A made-for-TV moment of courtroom drama may be coming in the Nixon tapes
litigation. The case, now stretching into its third month, will determine how
much the government owes the former president's estate for taking roughly
1,700 hours of his tape recordings and 42 million of his papers soon after he
resigned.

Since the case was initially filed -- 19 years ago! -- the government has
been arguing that Richard M. Nixon's estate should be paid zilch for the lot.
Nixon's lawyers, a crew from Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, put the price
as high as $213 million -- the collection's $35.5 million value in 1974, plus
compounded interest. The two sides have been haggling, filing,
counter-filing, examining and cross-examining ever since. Witnesses have
included former Watergate luminaries like John Dean.

But the real theater may lay ahead. Miller, Cassidy recently produced a list
of rebuttal witnesses that prominently featured none other than R. Stan
Mortenson, a Miller, Cassidy partner and a Nixon attorney for decades.

Mortenson intends to testify that the government's main appraiser, Charles
Sachs, is fudging, to put it charitably. Sachs, who is being paid by the
Justice Department, has opined for the record that Nixon's stuff is worth
about $1.5 million. But according to Mortenson, Sachs had a very different
opinion in 1974.

Then, at the behest of Nixon's lawyers, Sachs studied the collection for a
few days and raised the value to about $30 million, according to Mortenson.
Sachs proposed a longer-term study, at a cost to the firm of $6 million. The
firm declined and eventually Sachs made his way to the government side. He
remembers appraising the collection decades ago for Nixon's team but doesn't
recall the particulars of his conclusion.

Mortenson would like to refresh his memory -- and inflict some damage to the
credibility of a government expert. Mortenson says he was one of a handful of
attorneys whom Sachs debriefed in 1974. He took the best notes at the meeting
and so should have the chance to testify about it.

Whether he'll get to the stand is uncertain. Justice Department lawyers have
made clear that they hate the concept, pointing out that it typically isn't
kosher for an attorney to testify on behalf of a client. Miller, Cassidy,
however, argues that there are exceptions to that rule and Mortenson's
testimony is one of them.
<SNIP>










PETER A. KURILECZ CRM, CA
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