I don't see the problem. It would prevent people from walking in off the street and going through the records and it restricts staff (other than the director) from making excessive disclosures and handing out copies of records to anyone and eveyrone.
But I do know that Fukino has been using HRS 338-18a as the catch-all reason for not releasing anything.
Right, hoping people didn't read the rest of the law and see that there were legal exceptions and allowances. It's not like they volunteered the release of index data. It was dedicated people like you who started reading these laws and realizing the DOH wasn't telling the whole story and the whole truth.
The newspaper announcements were a continuous-running thing. Announcements were printed as much as a month after the birth so space issues wouldn’t have been the deciding factor.
I don't think it's safe to make this assumption. Filling a newspaper is a day-to-day decision. All the advertisements are placed first, and then whatever space is leftover is filled according to how much space is leftover. I don't think you can assume there was a consistent policy of trying to include every birth announcement and making good several days later for things that didn't originally fit. I'm sure they might fill up spaces with older announcements. It just kind of depends on what was available for whoever was editing that particular page. For a city of that size and for as many birth as should have occurred per day, it doesn't seem realistic to assume they tried to print every birth announcement and certainly not a regular, timely basis.
I wish there was a way to clarify these issues. If what you’re saying is true, then the only information that Fukino can’t divulge for anybody is birthdates, (for people born after UIPA was passed) and addresses. The very two things the birth announcements contained - although the addresses required a parent’s consent, at least after 1976. The birth date and certificate number used to be REQUIRED index data and so were intended to be grandfathered in for release when UIPA was passed.
Talk about screwy.
There may be a possibility that she couldn’t reveal a person’s requests regarding their own records to somebody besides that person. The OIP hasn’t directly ruled on that but referred to a possibility that the info could be restricted.
This is obviously at odds with how the HDOH interprets the law, at least out of one side of their mouths. lol. I wish there was a legal ruling. I wonder what the OIP Opinion Letters might say about it.
I sent an e-mail to Marsha McFadden, the editor of The Advertiser, asking for clarification regarding their procedures for birth announcements from the HDOH and what documentation there might be or what sources she relied on regarding the procedures in 1961. She never responded.
I work at a newspaper office with an old guy who’s been printing for the last 60 years, mostly with small-town newspapers so that’s a little bit different. I’ve asked him lots of questions about linotype. I asked him if it was especially difficult to decide what all to include because of space limitations. I was surprised that he actually said it was easier to make those decisions with linotype than when you have all kinds of editing options. With linotype you just started making the frames (I forget what he called them) and went until you were done. Because it was so laborious casting everything in lead they didn’t worry about trying to squeeze stuff in but just processed what they had and if they had to add some filler they had plenty of molds they could use for stock filler type stuff.
Like I said, that’s with smaller papers so they might have done it differently with large newspapers. Maybe somebody here knows.