History is being written every day in thousands of state offices across Maine. That's where, with the push of the send button, e-mail carries messages from state worker to state worker. Those messages range from the governor's instructions for staff members to commissioners deliberating over policy with advisors to administrative assistants setting up meetings. The record of state action lives, increasingly, in the intangible zone of cyberspace.

That's a massive change from just a generation ago, when communication took place via pieces of paper on which we either typed or hand-wrote our messages. Scholars and researchers previously reconstructed history largely from that paper record as well as the transcribed minutes of meetings. Files upon files were lodged in archives, where they contained everything from scribbles on a memo pad to formal reports emblazoned with the state seal.

The degree of state business that's transacted through e-mail is large and growing. If you're a historian, a lawyer, a student, an activist or a plain old citizen doing research who wants to know how a decision was made, then you have the right -- through the state's Freedom of Access Act, if necessary -- to see almost all the documents, including e-mails, that relate to that decision's evolution.

But what happens if someone in possession of those e-mails hits the delete button?

History gets erased.

That's why an ad-hoc group of state officials has been meeting for the last year. They want to devise a system to select, store and maintain e-mails. It's a massive undertaking that will require the services of an outside information management company; the group has sent out a request for proposals for the project and about 50 companies have attended a bidders' conference on the request.

It's important that this effort get under way as soon as possible. Currently, the state's approach to e-mail retention is haphazard and decentralized; depending on what department you work in, the requirements and enforcement of those requirements differ.

Furthermore, any effort to define what state e-mail must be retained should expand beyond the current makeup of the ad-hoc group to formally include at least one representative from the state Freedom of Information Coalition.

That's the organization formed to advocate for government transparency and to press for maximum adherence to the state's freedom of information laws. Their presence on any review committee will be important to ensure that the public's interest is appropriately served -- one person's offhand, casual e-mail that they believe should be deleted may very well turn out to be a journalist or historian's crucial piece of information.

Devising a system that can handle storage of state e-mails is essential. Defining broadly what e-mails should be retained is equally crucial. Without the evidence, the first draft of history can't even be written.