The White House Moves Into The 21st Century!

Posted by Dick Eastman on his EOGN:

Obama May Be Unable To Use BlackBerry at The White House
Genealogists who use computers can appreciate the marriage of technology with paper-based records. Sometimes that is a rocky marriage: the two do not always work well together. Now President-Elect Barack Obama may have a quandary.
Obama has long used a Blackberry device for communications. Like millions of other Blackberry addicts, he depends on it to conduct day-to-day business in an efficient manner. During the campaign, he told associates to never send him paper memos or reports. Instead, he wanted all reports sent to his Blackberry device. One can assume that he would like to continue that practice as President.
The problem is the Presidential Records Act. That Act requires all official correspondence to be public domain. This means that the incumbent President has "to dispose of records that no longer have administrative, historical, informational, or evidentiary value, once he has obtained the views of the Archivist of the United States on the proposed disposal."
In other words, the President cannot delete anything from the Blackberry until the Archivist of the United States has approved the deletion.
On the bright side, President-Elect Obama has also stated that he will be the first president to keep a laptop on the desk in the Oval Office. He plans to take the same laptop with him when he travels.
Indeed, the White House is now moving into the twenty-first century.