Obama May Be Unable To Use BlackBerry at The White House

Genealogists who use computers can appreciate the marriage of technology with paper-based records. Sometimes that is a rocky marriage: the two do not always work well together. Now President-Elect Barack Obama may have a quandary.

Obama has long used a Blackberry device for communications. Like millions of other Blackberry addicts, he depends on it to conduct day-to-day business in an efficient manner. During the campaign, he told associates to never send him paper memos or reports. Instead, he wanted all reports sent to his Blackberry device. One can assume that he would like to continue that practice as President.

The problem is the Presidential Records Act. That Act requires all official correspondence to be public domain. This means that the incumbent President has "to dispose of records that no longer have administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value, once he has obtained the views of the Archivist of the United States on the proposed disposal."

In other words, the President cannot delete anything from the Blackberry until the Archivist of the United States has approved the deletion.

On the bright side, President-Elect Obama has also stated that he will be the first president to keep a laptop on the desk in the Oval Office. He plans to take the same laptop with him when he travels.

Indeed, the White House is now moving into the twenty-first century.

Comments

[Elyse]

Wow...finally, a president with a laptop on his desk!

[Barbara]

I'm not sure that being President is worth losing your Blackberry over. It is courageous of Obama to offer himself up in the face of such deprivations.

[Sharon]

Here's an idea- have 2 or 3 Blackberrys- while the archivist is checking one or two out for archiving (and downloading those emails)- he's still got the other to use- then do the swap. :)

[Ifor Jackson]

Mwmo to genealogists:-

Paper can be archived; digital records cannot.

Anybody got floppy discs, tapes etc that are in obsolete formats? I've got dozens of things that are no longer readable; I've also got books that are 300 years old that are no problem.

[Linda]

I don't see the blackberry as a problem. They saved email from White House computers. Why can't they save it from a blackberry? Data can be transferred to other media for review by an archivist.

I disagree with the poster who said data cannot be archived. Data can be archived in digital format and saves tons of space. The key is to save it to a standard format (i.e. .jpeg for pictures; .pdf for documents) that hold up with time and transfer to whatever media is being currently used. I have scanned files and copies of email from the 1980's that are still readable because I transferred them to the most current media. The compactness of digital format also allows making duplicate copies and either storing a copy at another location or through an online service. I have digitized files of all my formerly non-original paper copies and recycled the paper. Another important thing is to organize your files in Windows folders (or whatever is comparable on Macs) and use a standard naming convention. Digitized files when organized are easier to retrieve and share than paper copies.

[Concetta]

Its easy to archive digital records - its called printing.

With any of my records I do a backup on my external harddrive in PDF format, a burned copy on DVD, and a print.

Very simple. And they have adapters to start grabbing some of your older things. Floppies, for example, now have USB adaptors for external drives. And 5 1/4" floppies can be sent to various services to archive them. Lots of Jaz drives and other tape variants are still out there - you just have to make friends and swap with people to move things to DVD or external harddrives.

[Linda]

Again...why PRINT? Save trees! Save space! In my opnion, a saved digital file is a better archival form than a printed copy. Concetta noted that you can find services/friends that can help if you get behind transferring your archived files from an older media form to a newer media form. Printing is just another copy of a file and just wastes paper and space.

I understand that it takes some time to get used to reading directly from a computer monitor but technology has improved so it is easier. I used to print everything and go through many reams of paper in a year. I looked at the paper and space I was wasting and adjusted so now I use less than a ream a year. I share files via email and CD or DVD which also saves on printing and postage costs. Through scanning and purging of non-originals, I have reclaimed several feet of shelf space previously used by a notebook filing system along with lots of closet space.

[Joy Chichester]

Maybe someone out there can help me. On an older Compaq hard drive, running a Windows 2000 program, I saved Word documents on floppy disks. The old PC had neither an E:\ drive, a USB port, nor a .pdf capability. Now I can't read those documents on a 2000 Dell PC with Windows XP. What happened? How can I retrieve "reams" of information "archived" on floppies? Some of the disks contain a book of unpublished poetry by my late common law husband (deceased 2003), which I transcribed from his illegible handwriting. At the time, I thought I was contributing the best possible effort to preserve this wonderful man's creativity. (For you paper-lovers, rest assured that I printed everything, but am reluctant to re-type everything for submission to a publisher).

Also, I read the comment on having friends help. Sorry, it seems all of my friends know less about computers and word processing than I do. The local Opportunity School (in a metro area of nearly 3 million population) doesn't even have a course offering website setup and design, which I sincerely need to learn. I'm a senior living on pension, and can't afford college tuition to learn all the computer stuff I want to learn.

Speaking of progress -- will my information in Family Tree Maker Version 11, saved to CD and flash drive, be readable a few years from now on a newer computer?

[Dick Eastman]

---> On an older Compaq hard drive, running a Windows 2000 program, I saved Word documents on floppy disks. The old PC had neither an E:\ drive, a USB port, nor a .pdf capability. Now I can't read those documents on a 2000 Dell PC with Windows XP.

Are you saying that you saved everything on floppies? If so, that is easily solved. Lots of companies sell external floppy drives that plug into the USB port of a modern computer. That requires the expenditure of a few dollars but plugs in and works within seconds. You can then copy the files to modern media.

---> will my information in Family Tree Maker Version 11, saved to CD and flash drive, be readable a few years from now on a newer computer?

YES, if you copy it to more modern media every few years. That's easy to so. But if you ignore it and leave the data on the shelf, it will eventually become obsolete.

Keeping data is similar to keeping a garden: you need to tend it and norish it and keep it healthy. If ignored, it dies.

- Dick Eastman

[theKiwi]

--->---> will my information in Family Tree Maker Version 11, saved to CD and flash drive, be readable a few years from now on a newer computer?

--->YES, if you copy it to more modern media every few years. That's easy to so. But if you ignore it and leave the data on the shelf, it will eventually become obsolete.

AND you keep available on a safe medium a software application that can read FTM Version 11 files. It's no good (well not so good) to be saving the actual data files, and losing track of what versions of software are needed to open them.

Clearly things like plain text files, PDF, JPEG are probably very safe, but more specialised file formats like FTM files usually need the software that created them to open them.

Roger

[Ruth]

I didn't know we had a White House Archivist. Wow, what a powerful person this Archivist is! Who is it? How is he/she chosen/appointed? Wonder how they know what to keep and what to throw. That would make an interesting article.

Is someone appointed to do the official presidential family tree for each President? That would be interesting too. Can you imagine the charts and what we could gleam from them!

Inquiring minds want to know : )

[Dick Eastman]

I believe that is the "Archivist of the United States."

[Pharmgrrl]

There are record keepers all in the government. I am one of them. I archive & maintain all records that are generated in my office. This means I maintain all paper and electronic media. My boss uses a Blackberry & he moves his files to a common area for me to file away in my electronic file cabinet. This records have to be maintained per government guidelines. Electronic records have to be updated every few years so that they do not become obsolete. The government has ways to archive the info off of his blackberry. The White House just needs to use the technology that the other agencies are using.

[Pharmgrrl]

Also there are set rules already in place that tell you what to keep & for how long. They even explain what exactly is a record. Also there are explict rules about printing out electronic records. We have to keep the media the same way we received it. The government ultimately wants to go paperless. It saves thousands of tax payer dollars each year. Paper & printer toner is painfully expensive. Electronic archiving is very reasonably priced & office space is saved. I hope that Obama will be able to keep his Blackberry.

[Margaret]

For more information, Google "national archivist"

[Karen S]

Email is included within the scope of the Presidential Records Act. As long as it's not an undisclosed account (e.g., Karl Rove's use of RNC email for official government business) it's less of a problem to archive copies of email messages than it is to 1) ensure that there is sufficient encryption of both messages and the account itself (e.g., Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo mail) and 2)that it cannot be co-opted to use as a tracking device to know the President's precise whereabouts. Hence no Blackberry, cell phone, etc. The objections come from the Secret Service, not the National Archives.

[Gerald Eberwein]

At the Mesa Expo 2008 the Family Search folks revealed that their archives are updated, as technology evolves, to conform to the technology of the time. Thus, archiving by electronic means is solved.