New Hampshire news organizations were successful in their challenge to a 2004 state law that would have made financial information in divorce files confidential. The state Supreme Court overturned a lower court that placed the primacy of individual privacy above the public’s right to be informed of court proceedings. Financial affidavits can still be sealed if “the party opposing disclosure of the document demonstrate that there is a sufficiently compelling reason that would justify preventing public access to that document.” The restrictive state law was instituted at the behest of Congressman Charles Douglas after his divorce.

Articles: Associated Press
Technorati Tags: new+hampshire, divorce+records

The Maine Attorney General found that the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP)violated the state’s public records act in refusing to release documents from meetings with the Rumford Paper Company. The agency entered into an agreement with Rumford in which the company kept all documents, as a means of circumventing release as a public record. Rumford eventually released some documents but acknowledged destroying others. The head of DEP was forced to resign.

Technorati Tags: public+records, maine

In my daily tour of the Internet I’ve been noticing a consolidation of public records search sites, which seem to be getting gobbled up by the database aggregator Intelius. This company’s primary business targets the consumer who makes the infrequent purchase of a people finder profile. Perhaps it’s my imagination but it seems as if Intelius is acquiring additional sites, based on looking at their interface and the link to the Intelius database.

Publicrecordfinder claims, to be the “Largest Public Records Directory”, which sounds strangely similar to SearchSystems.net, which is probably the oldest public records directory on the Internet, and collects links to government-operated online databases of public record indexes and documents. SearchSystems is the brainchild of Tim Koster, who is still the owner, and bills itself as the “Largest Free Public Records Directory.” I found most of the listed sites on the Publicrecordfinder site (I searched the Missouri page.) were dead links. The rest were a mixture of Intelius fee searches, government home pages and some government database indexes.

“The World’s Largest Directory of Internet Addresses” (iaf.net) is another Intelius linked site.

All these hyperbolical declarations of “the largest” got me wondering which other sites are making similar claims. I formulated an Internet search: allintitle: “world’s largest * directory”, and discovered “the world’s largest arabic sex directory,” which apparently refers to the gender of baby naming.

Technorati Tags: public+records, directories

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, responding to the recommendation of a state task force, has created a Meth Offender Registry Database. Search by name or by all offenders within a county. Results return the name, offense and date of conviction.

Technorati Tags: offender+registries, tennessee

The various free news providers that draw from many original sources -Google News or Yahoo! News- enable searches by keywords appearing at a specific url, and by keywords in news within a geographical region. The unique advantage offered by these sites is not just the ability to search many sources at once, but to do it on an ongoing basis, without having to reenter the search terms. You can add or remove your search terms at anytime; view the results at the search engine webpage, in your email or in a newsreader.

Sometimes you may want to search a personal name, company or topic limited to a geographical region. If you wanted to identify current crime blotter reports in New York newspapers your Google News or Yahoo! News search engine will formulate a request for the exact term “police reports” in the article text of New York newspapers: allintext: “police records” location:ny. Then save the search to “alerts” to receive daily updates.

If you want to search particular news sites, including ones that aren’t in the Google or Yahoo news search, go to your search engine “alerts” page. Add a search alert for “police reports” at the site, Great Neck Record, in this form:
“police report” site:http://www.antonnews.com/greatneckrecord/

Topix.net aggregates news from multiple sources, is keyword searchable, with results updated to your newsfeed reader. Limit local results to a city or zip code.

Create Google Alerts Yahoo! Alerts

Technorati Tags: local+search, news

The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL), a government body I haven’t given much thought to, has a quick reference to states that have adopted various recommendations on changes to their laws to create uniformity across all states. This organization of lawyers and legislators “supports the federal system and facilitates the movement of individuals and the business of organizations with rules that are consistent from state to state. ”

Select legislation from the drop-down menu to find the states that have adopted it and the summary language with bill tracking. For example, UNIFORM CHILD WITNESS TESTIMONY BY ALTERNATIVE METHODS ACT (2002) has been adopted by Idaho, Nevada and Oklahoma.

There is no site search engine so you can either search for all legislation by state or by the particular name of the legislation.

Technorati Tags: state+legislation

A state-by-state chart showing each states’ electronic surveillance laws, with links to the code sections, addresses both wiretapping and eavesdropping regulations, can be found at the National Conference of State Legislatures website. [Mentioned at Librarians’ Internet Index.] In an earlier PI News Link posting, I wrote about the legality of recording telephone conversations.

Technorati Tags: electronic+surveillance

I may just be imagining this, since I don’t often use the Sacramento County, California online criminal court index, but the details provided on criminal index search results seems to have expanded. And the site has announced that something (unspecified) is new! Enter a last name, first initial, or a case number to get filing information and disposition.

Technorati Tags: criminal+index, sacramento

I’m a big fan of Steve Morse’s advanced Social Security Death Index, one of the many search tools that he’s crafted and made available. Morse has added two new tweaks to other databases that increase their functionality. One he calls a birthday finder, the other helps to fill out a partial date of birth. The date of birth finder, which searches the privateeye.com database (the interface looks like Intelius or Zabasearch), allows for a first name only search. It also returns associates. [Reported by Genealogy and How]

Morse describes just how his search tool revs up the databases:

When using the One-Step form, the birthdates of the people found are displayed on the results page. When using the privateeye.com site directly, the results sent back include the birthdates but these dates are not displayed.

From the One-Step form you can search on just the year of birth and leave the month and day blank. If you do this from the privateeye.com site directly, you will get no results.

Technorati Tags: steve+morse,

Thurston County, Washington is about to launch a website with a searchable index of court cases, with case document images that can be printed. This is a convenient development but have you thought about the fate of hard copy records that are digitized? Government record archivists are sounding warnings of “digital death” — the loss of electronically stored records that evaporate once they’re removed from a government website. The California State Archivist estimates that half of all government documents suffer this fate.

Now, back to the issue of online court records. The Thurston County Court Clerk:

Records that once were kept in hundreds of boxes in archive vaults now are stored on eight computer hard drives and 100 backup DVDs. Almost all of the paper files were shredded, which Gould said was difficult for her to do after years of maintaining them.

Where are those backups stored? And how durable is the DVD media?

Technorati Tags: court+records, document+destruction