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City to post those 5,018 e-mails, but not as text
By adamg on Wed, 09/30/2009 - 7:13pm
The Globe reports Boston will hire a company to "scan" all the internal City Hall messages to and from Michael Kineavy and then post those (so sounds like PDFs, although maybe they'll make it even more fun and post 5,018 GIF images). No word on the other messages, the ones the city claims would cost $250,000 to retrieve - or the messages that were forwarded to the feds.
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Comments
Let's hope the resolution is
Let's hope the resolution is good enough for some OCR action. The ridiculousness of needing to scan in messages is so silly that it defies description...
PDFs. Boston City Council. Public Library Interlibrary Loan.
Likewise Boston City Council and the Boston Public Library Department's Interlibrary Loan Services Office fail to use the text format feature of pdf as if everything has to be an image scan and so less usable by people interested in the content.
http://bpl.org/research/illoan.htm
that's actually a surprising
that's actually a surprising common thing. When I used to get research articles through ILL, Another library would print out a pdf, fax it to my library, which would then scan it in so I could read it online. Just awesome.
The zak
you are on fire lately. when the election passes, will you go back into remission?
By which you mean...
...and so less usable by people interested in the content.And so less enabling of the one person who wants to spend all his waking hours performing searches on City Council minutes and BPL documents in order to generate automated complaints.
There, fixed that for you.
Oh, Zak
The BPL scans articles because they are in print to begin with. "The text feature" doesn't apply here because they aren't digital to begin with.
Scanning!? Ridiculous beyond belief
I'm sorry not to be adding anything useful, except a certain gape-jawed outrage, to Seth's post, but repetition is the mother of pedagogy. Or, something.
When will these people learn?
Let's stipulate for a teeny-tiny moment that there is some good reason for this jaw-dropping solution. The fact that we despised citizens are exhibiting fits and twitches over this sequence of events ("We give you paper," "Oh. Now we give you image files.") says two things.
First the ham-fisted IT in Menino's Bunker would embarrass, I dunno, East Dubuque, or Davenport, or even Iowa City, let alone the Hub of the Solar System and the Athens of America.
Second, given the stinging ridicule of the previous paper solution [sic!], you'd think they would have thought this one through.
Fer cryin' out loud. There are only 5K objects, each with—what?—a dozen attributes? A single guy, juggling just text, could touch every single email and serve this piss-ant database in three different formats over the course of a weekend. Worried about a perfect solution that handles images and attachments? Don't. Kick those pesky non-text objects to the curb and deal with them in a second pass.
Revise the public records request or make another.
Just make another public records request for the data by email. Request the original format that is the files of data and ask for it to be sent by email.
OK the zak, that's it
Prove to me that you're not a bot by providing, in plain ASCII format, what 5 plus 4 equals.
Go.
9
9 thousand and 42
Any word yet from the Sec of State
about whether or not the City should proceed with actually trying to recover Kineavy's own emails? Has Galvin been moved by the $250K sob story to have mercy on the transgressors or will he order the city to find the money somewhere (perhaps in Menino's own campaign fund- after all, why should the taxpayers have to suffer?), and get on with it?
What purpose?
Per one of the emails that was posted Kineavy was extremely conscious of the "FOIA-able"-ness of his emails - my guess is if he was doing anything questionable - he either did if verbally, indirectly or through a private phone/email. Much as I would love to see some of this stuff nailed to these guys - I don't think it's going to happen - won't hurt to look - but we have probably have better things to spend the cash on.
"missing" email messages
It's 2009. Who on earth runs the IT department for Boston City Hall? Almost twenty years ago I worked at an organization that had a really stupid email archive system. Literally, messages were delivered both to the mail spool and a copy of all messages was kept in a file on a separate disk. The users didn't need access to that copy, but it provided an instant backup in case of deleted messages.
If that type of solution was possible in 1991, why didn't the city do it (or something equally untechnical) in 2009?
Supposedly, they were not aware of any
deficiencies in the archiving system until this politically damaging scandal erupted. Like, "Whoa, jeez- good call, Boston Globe- Kineavy probably should have more than 18 emails! Thanks for bringing this whole thing to our attention- we'll get a crack team on it right away!"
Whatever. The thing that has always annoyed me the most about the Menino Administration is the sheer volume of straight-faced bullshit it produces, deceitful words and actions which fall just short of outright lying but which can be quite infuriating in the aggregate. I suppose, however, this is true of all politicians and government agencies. C'est la vie.
As far as the Wilkerson thing went, she probably pestered (lobbied?) Kineavy about the license and he in turn pestered/nudged Pokaski and it got approved- but I doubt Kineavy took a bribe or anything. But the licensing board is not really supposed to work that way, so these conversations would be embarassing. This is my hypothesis, subject to revision only upon the retrieval of every single email, dammit!
Two hund -- wot?!
Will somebody please get a Quote from the Books Department @ Google!!
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