When I was working on a project to implement RIM for a Southwestern City
in the mid-1980's, we began with the usual "search and rescue" task to
find anything and everything that may be a record.  The City Hall was in
an old high school and there were a number of locked closets for which
no one had keys.  A little background - the City was the official
address for the labs working on the Manhattan Project during WWII.  All
documents with any reference to the labs (such as City Council Minutes)
were accessioned by the Atomic Energy Commission in the early 1950's and
hauled off to Washington D.C.  

During the RIM project time period, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management
announced it was trading some (now) very valuable land within the City
limits for land adjacent to a National Forest.  Folks with long memories
in the City swore the land in question had not been given or sold to the
U.S. BLM, but had only been loaned for use as a military hospital during
WWII.  Unfortunately, the City council Minutes approving the "loan"
could not be found by the Feds amongst the AEC records.  Coincidently,
shortly after the BLM news hit the media, one of the mystery closets was
breached (by a very competent locksmith) and we found several boxes of
old audit reports.  Included were audit reports from WWII which showed
the land had been loaned not given or sold. 

Ginny Jones
(Virginia A. Jones, CRM, FAI)
Records Manager
Information Technology Division
Newport News Dept. of Public Utilities
Newport News, VA
[log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
From: Records Management Program [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of debbie ferguson
Sent: Thursday, July 24, 2008 11:27 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [RM] Unusual Missing file stories

I am curious to know if any records managers on this listserv have
particularly interesting/unusual tales of where you have turned up
missing files. We all have ones about the 'one that got away' (i.e. was
never found), and I know that I and my peers are always joking about how
that 'missing' file is probably in attorney so-and-so's
trunk/briefcase/bottom of a moving box. But I would like to know if
anyone has ever turned up a 'missing' file someplace completely
unexplainable (once I found a missing file being used as a mousepad in a
conference room, and I just located a file that had been checked in to
our records system 2 years ago in a pile of files on the desk of a
records staffer we fired last week, but I guess in retrospect those
could make sense to someone).
 
Debra Ferguson
Senior Records Manager
Duane Morris LLP
 
[log in to unmask]       
 
 
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