The Modern Archivist

Government Metadata Now Subject to Production

On October 7^th, in O’Neill v. City of Shoreline the Supreme Court of Washington ruled that metadata of government records are subject to disclosure under Washington’s Public Records Act (PRA).

The case involved a request for e-mails from employees of the State of Washington. The requested e-mails, which were duplicates, were provided in hard copy format to plaintiff without the original metadata. The plaintiff again requested the original e-mail complete with metadata. Unfortunately, the original e-mail had been deleted. To further complicate matters, at least one recipient in the original e-mail had been included solely in the blind carbon copy (BCC) function, as the to and from fields were not used to address the relevant individual. Metadata in the BCC field is challenging to capture.

Since the City of Shoreline was unable to produce the e-mail and metadata, the plaintiff alleged that the defendant violated the Public Records Act. Upon review from the Supreme Court of Washington, the court declined to hold that the City had violated the PRA, but the court is compelling  the City to recover the requested metadata from the BCC’d recipient’s computer. The trial court was instructed to hold the City in violation of the PRA If the recovery is futile.

O’Neill v. City of Shoreline was Washington’s first exposure to the question over the availability of metadata, and only the second case nationwide. This case, combined with the other case hailing from Arizona, form important e-Discovery precedent. Taking cue from the Arizona Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Washington ruled that [emphasis mine]:

“Metadata may contain information that relates to the conduct of government and is important for the public to know. It could conceivably include information about whether a document was altered, what time a document was created, or who sent a document to whom…We agree with the Supreme Court of Arizona that an electronic version of a record, including its embedded metadata, is a public record subject to disclosure.”

The scope of production for Washington’s PRA has thus been significantly widened and any future failure to properly capture and produce metadata will result in violations of the Public Records Act. As Arizona and now Washington have shown, this is a trend which is likely to continue as courts learn to understand the value of metadata for providing context and information. State governments must prepare themselves to comply with requests which involve metadata.

From an e-mail perspective, which is highlighted in this case, states will be required to journal e-mails into an archive in order to be able to capture all relevant metadata. For instance, in order to capture the BCC metadata used in this case, the state would have had to archive the e-mail using a journal method. ZL Technologies’ Unified Archive provides the ability to journal, along with many more functionalities to archive the content and metadata of over 1000 file types. Visit www.zlti.com to find out more.