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The Library of Virginia is pleased to announce the release of 26,988 emails from the administration of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (2006-2010). This latest batch comprises emails from individuals in the office of Kaine’s Secretary of Education. Included are the email boxes of Thomas Morris, Judith Heiman, Dietra Trent, Douglas Garcia, Jean Bankos, Kathy Glazer, Kendall Tyree, June Hines, Lorraine Lintecum, and Nicholas Galvin. Since January 2014, the Library has made 183,558 emails from the Kaine administration freely available online to the public.

This release is the first to use artificial intelligence to aid in classifying public records. The specific technology applied to the Secretary of Education’s email is known as Continuous Active Learning™, a method of machine learning developed by Gordon V. Cormack and Maura R. Grossman, professors in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

Cormack and Grossman have been collaborating with the Library of Virginia since 2015, when they used the initial release of email from Governor Kaine’s administration as a benchmark for evaluation at TREC, the Text REtrieval Conference Conference, organized by the National Institute of Technology (NIST). Look for more details on the Library’s experimentation with artificial intelligence in the forthcoming Fall 2018 issue of Broadside.

The Office of the Secretary of Education assisted the governor in the development and implementation of the state’s education policy. These efforts included early child hood initiatives such as Start Strong, which focused on Pre-K education. This release also covers the creation of the Office of Early Childhood Development, the American Diploma Project Network, higher education restructuring, Commonwealth Scholars, and the NGA Honor States Grant. The office also assisted in the creation of the Virginia Tech Victims (VTV) Family Outreach Foundation. For the complete picture, you will need to jump into the collection and start digging. The archived website and Cabinet Weekly Reports of the Secretary of Education provide additional information on its activities.

Roger Christman

Senior State Records Archivist

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