News Briefs, October 1985

Update on US Bicentennial Commis­sion: In late June, President Reagan named Chief Justice Warren E. Burger to head the Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution. Chief Justice Burger is also an honorary chair of the Project ’87 Advisory Board. The resolu­tion creating the Commission calls for the President, Chief Justice Burger, and the leadership of the Senate and the House to name a total of twenty-three members to the Commission. At the time of writing, one member had still to be named.

The members of the Commission are: Chief Justice Warren E. Burger; Fred­erick K. Biebel, Executive Vice Presi­dent of the International Cooperation Fund; US Representative Lindy Boggs; Herbert Brownell, former At­torney General; Lynne Anne V. Che­ney, senior editor, Washingtonian Maga­zine; US Representative   Philip M. Crane; William J. Green, of Wolf, Block, Schorr, and Solis-Cohen in Philadelphia; Rev. E. V. Hill, Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church; Cornelia G. Kennedy, US Circuit Judge, 6th Cir­cuit; Senator Edward M. Kennedy; Dean Harry McKinley Lightsey, Jr., University of South Carolina Law Cen­ter; Edward Pierpont Morgan, of Welch & Morgan, Washington, DC; Betty Southard Murphy, of Baker and Hos­tetler, Washington, DC; Thomas H. O’Connor, Department of History, Bos­ton College; Phyllis Schlafy, Eagle Fo­rum; Professor Bernard H. Siegan, School of Law, University of San Diego; Senator Ted Stevens; Obert C. Tanner, O. C. Tanner & Co., Salt Lake City, UT; Senator Strom Thurmond; Ronald H. Walker, Korn/Ferry International; Ronald H. Walker, US Court of Appeals, California; and Professor Charles Alan Wright, School of Law, University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Mark Cannon, for­merly administrative assistant to the Chief Justice, has been appointed exec­utive director.

Committee on the Records of Govern­ment: Historians who sit before their computers marveling at the efficiency of their machines were warned recently that the age of computers also marks the advent of the electronic record. Just as many historians now sit editing and rewriting at their terminals, so govern­ment officials now delete original drafts as they complete policy papers. And as the historians reuse their floppy disks or purge their “files” with the press of a button, so can government officials per­manently remove from the record the documents necessary for historical re­search.

These and other problems are the subject of a recent report of the Com­mittee on the Records of Government. The Committee was sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council and the Council on Library Resources. Funding for the eighteen-month study was provided by the Mellon, Rockefel­ler, and Sloan Foundations. Additional funding was also supplied by the Coun­cil on Library Resources. Ernest R. May, Harvard University was Chairman of the Committee. Other Committee mem­bers, Richard W. Bolling, Philip W. Bu­chen, Joseph A. Califano, Jr., Phillip S. Hughes, Edward H. Levi, and Franklin A. Lindsay were former public officials and corporate executives. Project Direc­tor was Anna K. Nelson, George Wash­ington University.

Following a brief history of the devel­opment of current procedures regard­ing public records, the Report noted a number of current problems.

First, the Report noted that responsibility for decisions regarding record keeping and records is fragmented and ill-defined. Indeed the passage of the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 exac­erbated the problem since it instructs the Director of the Office of Manage­ment and Budget (OMB) to coordinate information management, thus placing within that agency certain new responsi­bilities for records. Under various fed­eral statutes, responsibility for records currently is divided between four groups: the individual agencies (for ex­ample State Department or Education Department), the General Services Ad­ministration (GSA), National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and OMB. Legislation passed last year severing the National Archives from GSA left ambiguous the division of re­sponsibility for record-keeping between those two agencies. As a result of this fragmentation, record and information policies are rarely coordinated and are often contradictory rather than compli­mentary.

Second, the government is increasingly creating records electronically and retaining tapes or disks rather than pa­per. The danger of losing historically valuable records is thereby greatly increased. Important data or textual rec­ords may well be erased before anyone has a chance to exercise judgement about their value. When the accumula­tion of statistical, scientific, or technical material on tapes exceeds storage capacity or budgetary allowances, decisions on erasure may be arbitrary without any understanding of its historical signifi­cance. Or, equally as serious, tapes may be archived only to become unreadable because the machines to read them no longer exist.

Reflecting the limitations of both time and budget, the Committee Report con­cluded with recommendations designed to point the way toward devising solu­tions, rather than specifying them. The recommendations called upon agencies to rationalize their informative manage­ment and records management systems, defined a leadership role for the archi­vist of the United States (now appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate) and called upon President Rea­gan to issue an executive order that would require each agency head to ap­point an archivist or historian to assist the information resources manager now in charge of agency information and (in some instances records) under the Pa­perwork Reduction Act. The executive order should also establish a Records Management Policy Council to coordi­nate the fragmented policies now in existence.

Copies of the Report of the Committee on the Records of Government may be obtained by writing or calling the Council on Library Resources, 1785 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Suite 313, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 483-7474.

Fellowships for Minorities: The Ford Foundation recently set up a $9 million doctoral fellowship program designed to increase the number of minorities on college and university faculties. To sup­port PhD studies in the arts and sci­ences, the program will award fellow­ ships and dissertation-completion grants to blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans.

The doctoral program will be ad­ministered by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. A national competition will be held to select the fellows. Over five years, the council will award 120 three­ year fellowships that include a $10,000 annual stipend and $6,000 per year for tuition and fees. Ten $18,000 awards also will be awarded to minority PhD candidates who have completed all of the requirements for the degree except the dissertation.

The NRC will begin accepting ap­plications this month. For application information, contact the council’s fel­lowship office at 2101 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20418.