A GRS instructs agencies how to dispose of a class of records. The GRS for electronic records said that an agency could dispose of an electronic record if it kept a paper copy. But the court decided that a GRS was only supposed to cover administrative and not program records. Electronic records include both, so the GRS exceeded its statutory authority. In a key finding, the court said that electronic versions are not merely copies of paper records.
Electronic records are worthy of preservation in their own right.
They can be searched, indexed and transmitted in a way that paper records cannot. Again the court found that paper equivalents are not always complete. Printouts of word processing documents, for example, may omit summaries, comments and annotations. The GRS decision is now on appeal, but the legal niceties are less important than devising the right policy for e-mail and other electronic records. We need to preserve electronic documents in electronic form.