Public Records Requests
CPH gets public records requests, mostly from lawyers, for a variety of reasons. Virtually in all cases, they request emails related to the topic for a certain time period. These emails will have to go through a redaction process before being handed off to the public. So this is how email extraction requests are handled:
1 First Step
Only Health HR Director can request emails to be extracted from Health employee’s email accounts for a public request. There are three things necessary: 1) what are the employee email accounts involved, 2) what is the time period for the extraction, and 3) what is the subject matter or context that should be used to extract the associated emails. This process is started through a TechDesk ticket and at this point, the job of the HR Director is complete.
2 Second Step
You wait on DoT to extract the emails requested. When they complete the extraction, usually they will place a .pst file (for each Health person identified) on the X drive in the “Data Request” (parent folder), in a subfolder that has a number ID. DoT will identify that folder to the HR Director or IT Coordinator.
3 Third Step
What the IT coordinator does is import each pst file (usually the username is listed on the pst file), into Outlook as a personal folder. Usually there are two main folders in the extracted pst file for each person, the Inbox and the Sent folder (sometimes you will see other folders in there as well, such as the “Deleted” folder). You select all the extracted email in the Inbox folder and export it to a pdf file – giving it a file name of the “person name Inbox”.pdf”. Do the same for the sent folder. Continue on until all the folders contained in each pst has a pdf file created for it Store the files where the users can get to it on the S drive (there are different folders being used – just whatever folder the person who is handling the records request wants you to put it.
4 Fourth Step
Redactors (could be one (Shelly Mitchell) to many folks), will swoop in and redact the email pdf files (to protect the innocent), then re-save the file. These files will placed in a folder where all the other non-email redacted files are stored, usually somewhere on the S drive. Once you are notified they are done with redaction, you will copy all the files onto a flash drive and had it off to the person managing the request (usually Kelly Newman).