Constituent Mail Analysis Project
About CMAP | Use of Correspondence Management Systems by the Senate | Data Description
TERMS:
Within the CMAP site, the terms constituent mail and constituent correspondence include all kinds of correspondence between a member of Congress and his or her constituents, including letters on legislative issues, requests for flags and other routine matters, letters requesting that the Senator intercede on the constituent's behalf with a federal department or agency, thank you letters, and mass mailings. Letters on legislative issues will be referred to as issue mail and letters requesting intervention on the constituent's behalf with a federal department or agency will be termed casework.
Building on the systematization and standardization provided by word processing, correspondence management systems offered sophisticated word processing; the capability of inserting selected, approved paragraphs; personalized salutations and closings; personalized text; the ability to create targeted mailing lists; correspondence records; mail count on issues; automatic filing; and correspondence tracking. The correspondence management system index on which CMAP is based includes all mail indexed on the system, regardless of type. Because CMAP focuses on correspondence related to legislative issues, identifiable casework is excluded from the result sets. Researchers interested in studying the casework handled by Senator Nunn's office should contact the Director of the Electronic Data Center or the Special Collections & Archives Division for access to those files.
The Senate Computer Center standardized the correspondence management system computer files sent to archival repositories holding congressional papers. (These files are considered part of a Senator's personal papers, and as such they are usually transferred to the archival repository with the member's paper records, photographs, awards, videos, and other materials.) The files were intended to serve as an index to the correspondence and include one record for every response sent by the Senator's office. The format of these standard files changed slightly in 1996 after Senate Archivist Karen Paul solicited input from the repositories, however, in general, the same information has been transferred to archival repositories since correspondence management systems were first adopted in the late 1970s
The fixed-field ASCII files generated by the Senate Computer Center from the correspondence management systems contain the following fields in the following order:
- constituent's name (last, first middle, prefix, suffix)
- constituent's title
- constituent's organizational affiliation
- first line of constituent's address
- second line of constituent's address
- city in which constituent lives
- state in which constituent lives
- constituent's zip code
- type of correspondence (issue, casework, administrative, etc.)
- topic of correspondence (broad subject)
- subtopic (narrower focus within the designated topic)
- date the reply was written
- initials of the staff member who answered the letter
- unique document number assigned to the reply letter
- list of the identification numbers for the approved paragraphs used to construct the reply letter
Constituent names, titles, organizational affiliations, and street addresses in the Nunn correspondence indexes may not be accessed at the present time. This personal information is restricted until 2017.
IDENTIFIED DATA IRREGULARITIES:
A uniform data format can mask differences in the way that various Senate offices used the correspondence management systems. System documentation indicates only what the system was designed to do. It does not document the ways in which a Senator's staffers worked within the system to record things not anticipated by the system designers. For example, Senator Nunn's Atlanta office overrode the system-assigned document number so that all mail related to a particular case would have the same document number. This practice makes it appear as if there are duplicate entries for the same document.
The early CMS and CSS correspondence management systems (in use from 1978 to 1994) provided no controls over the information entered their databases. Misspellings and variant spellings are present in all the fields, including topic, subtopic, city, state, and zipcode. In some cases, fields were left blank. In addition, the process for transferring the data from the original system to the flat ASCII format occasionally placed data in the wrong field. No attempt has been made to clean up or correct the data in the Nunn CMS and CSS files. Researchers interested in determining the extent of the data irregularities or in editing the data for further study are encourage to contact the Director of the Electronic Data Center.
The correspondence management files should allow a researcher to more easily determine the quantity of mail received on a given topic without having to sample the paper files. Researchers, however, will have to take time to carefully examine the database file for irregularities and will need to consult memos and other records concerning correspondence files to determine if there has been any duplication or data loss. Three examples from Senator Nunn's papers indicate some of the types of irregularities found in the correspondence management system databases:
- Some correspondence management systems allowed staffers to make copies of entries and then assign them different topics/subtopics. When Senator Nunn's office changed its subtopic for Desert Storm from "Middle East" to "Iraq-Kuwait," for example, the staff created a duplicate entry for all records previously entered under "Middle East" with the new topic "Iraq-Kuwait." The early records, therefore, appear twice in the database. In order to avoid counting the earlier letters twice, researchers should exclude letters from the Gulf War period with the topic-subtopic combination "Defense-Middle East."
- When the Senate debated the Gays in the Military issue, Senator Nunn received so much mail that his staff had to outsource it to a vendor in order to make sure that it was answered in a timely manner. The mail handled by the vendor is not included in the CMS index, but weekly counts of the number of letters processed by the vendor (divided into pro and con) were sent to the office and filed in the staff archivist's files. Researchers will not get an accurate count of the mail sent to Senator Nunn regarding Gays in the Military (which was indexed under "Defense-Manpower and Personnel") unless they include the printed reports from the vendor.
- Shortly after Senator Nunn's office changed from CSS to CapitolCorrespond, several hundred new records were deleted when data entry operators accidentally pressed the wrong key after generating the response letter.
The early CMS and CSS correspondence management systems (in use from 1978 to 1994) provided no controls over the information entered their databases. Misspellings and variant spellings are present in all the fields, including topic, subtopic, city, state, and zipcode. In some cases, fields were left blank. In addition, the process for transferring the data from the original system to the flat ASCII format occasionally placed data in the wrong field. No attempt has been made to clean up or correct the data in the Nunn CMS and CSS files. Researchers interested in determining the extent of the data irregularities or in editing the data for further study are encourage to contact the Director of the Electronic Data Center.
The correspondence management files should allow a researcher to more easily determine the quantity of mail received on a given topic without having to sample the paper files. Researchers, however, will have to take time to carefully examine the database file for irregularities and will need to consult memos and other records concerning correspondence files to determine if there has been any duplication or data loss. Three examples from Senator Nunn's papers indicate some of the types of irregularities found in the correspondence management system databases:
- Some correspondence management systems allowed staffers to make copies of entries and then assign them different topics/subtopics. When Senator Nunn's office changed its subtopic for Desert Storm from "Middle East" to "Iraq-Kuwait," for example, the staff created a duplicate entry for all records previously entered under "Middle East" with the new topic "Iraq-Kuwait." The early records, therefore, appear twice in the database. In order to avoid counting the earlier letters twice, researchers should exclude letters from the Gulf War period with the topic-subtopic combination "Defense-Middle East."
- When the Senate debated the Gays in the Military issue, Senator Nunn received so much mail that his staff had to outsource it to a vendor in order to make sure that it was answered in a timely manner. The mail handled by the vendor is not included in the CMS index, but weekly counts of the number of letters processed by the vendor (divided into pro and con) were sent to the office and filed in the staff archivist's files. Researchers will not get an accurate count of the mail sent to Senator Nunn regarding Gays in the Military (which was indexed under "Defense-Manpower and Personnel") unless they include the printed reports from the vendor.
- Shortly after Senator Nunn's office changed from CSS to CapitolCorrespond, several hundred new records were deleted when data entry operators accidentally pressed the wrong key after generating the response letter.
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