We encountered this same issue in the "old" microfilm days.  The
consensus of learned opinion at the time was that "sealed" meant
"sealed" and no could open the files without a court order.  The number
of possible pairs of eyes seeing the records in order to microfilm the
paper and inspect the film was often considered excessive.  In addition,
images of sealed records could not be on the same film roll as
non-sealed records.  Some courts in the U.S. did find ways of filming
sealed records as backup, but it took a whole lot of complicated
procedures to accomplish it.  Then the film rolls had to be "sealed" and
stored in special environmental storage areas.  

I cannot see how these issues could be overcome with electronic imaging.
How would you "seal" the images?  Place them all on CDs and "seal" the
CDs?  What would you do with any backup tapes of the image files that
were created during the imaging project?  Images usually sit on a PC or
server during indexing and quality inspection before being burned to a
separate media.  How would you insure the images on the server/PC are
completed deleted? What about future migration?  CDs are not long term
storage media and the images would have to be migrated every 10 years or
so.  The "sealed" records issues would have to be addressed with every
migration.


Ginny Jones
(Virginia A. Jones, CRM, FAI)
Records Manager
Information Technology Division
Newport News Dept. of Public Utilities
Newport News, VA
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-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Jennifer Snyder
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 6:58 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [RM] Sealed Records

Hello All,

We currently receive court records which have been sealed by the court.
 These documents are sent in sealed envelopes to the City Clerk/Records
Management Division for storing in locked filing cabinets in the vault. 
The volume of these files is growing and we are running out of space. 
What are other government entities doing with their sealed court
records?  Are they opening the sealed records and imaging them into an
EDMS with high levels of security or are you retaining the paper copies
in a locked filing cabinet?  I'm looking for other options.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you in advance,

Jennifer Snyder
City of North Las Vegas
Records Manager 
702/633-1036

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