Maybe you remember when administrative assistants -- they were called "secretaries" back then -- put pieces of paper and carbon filters into typewriters and carefully typed up memos and letters their bosses would send around.

I remember the 1980s, when we wrote memos on IBM Selectric typewriters, went to copying machines, decided how many copies we needed and sent them to people who wanted to read what we'd written.

What a joke today.

Much of that communication now is done via e-mail. Computers are our new typewriters. And e-mails -- if you feel formal, you might do professional-looking Word attachment -- are the new written memos.

But technological breakthroughs can be two-edged swords. (Who out there likes returning from vacation with 884 e-mails waiting to be read?) Maine leaders are dealing with how to save and make "retrievable" e-mails being written daily by state officials and employees who use some 13,000 e-mail logins. An article by Statehouse reporter Susan Cover last week said the task could take years and cost $1 million or more to accomplish.

That is a lot of money. But there's a lot at stake.

Some of these state e-mails, as you might imagine, are quite important. Why did the state Department of Environmental Protection approve a landfill expansion in your town? It's probably explained somewhere in an e-mail. Why was your local street-widening project put off for a few years? There's probably an e-mail about that, too.

In Maine, the law holds that e-mails on topics like these and many others are public records. Maine recognizes that government employees are making and explaining critical, public-policy decisions via e-mails. However, at this point Maine has no uniform system for labeling, collecting or preserving these important and public documents.

Mal Leery, a Maine radio and newspaper correspondent who heads the state's Freedom of Information Coalition, says getting a handle on archiving all public records, e-mails included, is a "huge issue." (Full disclosure: I helped found and am an associate member of Leery's group.)

State Archivist David Cheever agrees. Cheever says Maine is being watched by other states in terms of how it will treat and handle e-mail public records.

Maine is at the vanguard of this issue somewhat accidentally: We are a small state (13,000 state e-mail accounts would be nothing in California or New York), e-mails from state employees are considered public records here and virtually all of our state e-mails can be retrieved with our current computer systems.

That doesn't mean Maine has it licked. Cheever says the state has a lot of work to do preserving and categorizing e-mails, thus making them reliably retrievable.

Cheever raised this possibility: An important state official e-mails someone in another agency with the subject line, "Dice-K was bad last night."

The e-mail mostly is about the Boston Red Sox pitcher, but toward the end, the e-mail writer brings up an important state issue, the writer offers and opinion and that exchange -- casual as it may have seemed in an e-mail mostly about Dice-K -- leads to a crucial decision.

Would this e-mail be stored on a computer server currently? Yes. Would someone who wanted records about the decision at the end this e-mail be certain to get a copy of it, as state law requires? Maybe not.

This scenario wasn't envisioned fully when public-records laws were written. Back in the memo-typing days, no one wrote a memo about a landfill expansion and started it with five paragraphs about Dice-K. But this happens now and it's why so much rides on how state officials will keep, categorize and be able to retrieve e-mails.

If you're reading this thinking, "The editor just wants to make sure his reporters get all the information they can," you're right to a point. Public-access laws are critically important to our news gathering at times.

But freedom-of-access laws are not really about "selling newspapers" nor about just the media. They are about you, too. In fact, at the federal level, most Freedom of Information requests are from people like you, non-journalists looking for genealogical and historical information.

Eric Conrad is executive editor of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. He can be reached at econrad@centralmaine.com.