The National Center for State Courts (NCSC) recently published Best Practices for Court Privacy Policy Formulation, which includes the updated public access and privacy guidelines from an earlier Conference of State Court Administrators  (COSCA) model (released in 2002).  A proof of concept (POC) report was needed to determine the accuracy of automatically redacted information, which should be generated in conjunction with the revised Model Policy for Electronic Public Access to Court Case Records.  The NCSC collaborated with Computing System Innovations (CSI) and Extract, – private vendors offering automated data-identification tools in their product lines, as well as state and local courts, which provided the records essential to the POC review process.

Some highlights of the report beyond its descriptive methodology, include the following:

• A breakdown of accuracy rates by: Redaction Target, High-level (overall), Data and Document Types;
• Description of the essential components needed for testing within the court case records; and,
• A multi-factor system for determining redacted targets.

Issued in September 2017, the full report titled, “Automated Redaction: Proof of Concept Report,” is available online, through the NCSC Library’s eCollection.  Also included among the list of COSCA resources, this report, reaffirms the connection to content and methodology when reviewing for accuracy across redacted records.