I went to school in the days of the library card catalog and “Index to Periodical Literature,” where research involved thumbing through the indexes and writing down what one wanted to go look for elsewhere. The biggest challenge we faced then was finding a library big enough to have what we wanted to read, or waiting for an interlibrary loan.
Notes would be copied from the source document into a notebook, or onto note cards, which would pile up like leaves in the fall, during any significant research effort.
By the early 1970s photocopiers (aka Xerox machines) were common enough that some handwritten notes could be eliminated.
To keep track of where things were, one had to devise some sort of system that would allow for easy retrieval of what one was looking for. Too bad looking under “E” for “elephant,” if you filed it under mammal.
Between then and now mountains of every conceivable kind of source material have become available to us in the Information Age from a pocket device that would have astounded Dick Tracy and Maxwell Smart.
It’s hardly necessary to index or file what arrives at an email inbox because it’s all available in a search. There’s no need to look for “elephant” or” mammal,” when simply remembering I read it last Tuesday at noon, or there was the word blue in the message, is enough.
I stopped saving website bookmarks years ago because a simple search usually brings up most sites I want in the blink-of-an-eye.
All of which is to say that writing about local government and school board activities drives me almost insane some days. Every school board and town website is different. Some store documents in a form that aren’t indexed by search engines. Some destroy documents that provide an historical record; for example, deleting a meeting agenda after the minutes are posted.
Each town and school district provides different information about meetings with some posting only minutes and an audio recording afterward, in which it’s almost impossible to identify the speaker. It gets a bit easier to know who spoke in the recording of a virtual meeting when everyone has their own little box with a name, but even then those who call in by phone might be identified only by a number.
In the towns we cover, it’s rare for each speaker to be identified by the chair or moderator, except perhaps at town meetings.
Open meeting laws essentially only mean the body can’t hide most things from those in the room. And they can’t talk about their business if there are too many of them in one place, or on an email thread. Policing of that is mostly up to members of the body and the honor system.
Figuring out what happened later is a whole other matter and most won’t begin to spend the time searching for details.
Thankfully journalists exist to do it for you, but we sometimes get a bit grouchy as deadlines approach and any number of frustrations present themselves.
Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
