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Jared Polis Donates Congressional Records, Social Media Archive To CU Boulder

Jared Polis
Polis for Colorado
Jared Polis

The highlights from Jared Polis' decade in the U.S. House of Representatives were downloaded onto a 120-gigabyte flash drive this month and delivered to the University of Colorado Boulder.

Archivists at the school are very excited about the gift.

"This is the first time we will have worked with a political collection that includes archived social media," said Megan Friedel, who manages CU Boulder's archives.

It's also the first time the university has scored a political archive that is primarily electronic. Previous collections at the university, including the congressional papers from former U.S. Senator Ken Salazar, took up hundreds of linear feet of storage space.

Friedel said Polis' records came in on the flash drive and just a handful of boxes containing papers.

She said future Coloradans will be able to study how Polis became a pioneer at using social media in office. Every Tweet, Instagram post and Facebook comment Polis made as a congressman will be preserved in the new collection.

"The fun thing about the social media accounts is it really captures Jared Polis' relationship with his constituents," Friedel said. "It's a really fantastic record of very current ways the public can interact with politicians in office."

Polis' congressional archives will also include his daily briefings, notes and other correspondence with constituents.

Some of the collection, including the archived social media posts, will be made public in the coming weeks, but other files will stay under lock and key until the year 2050.That's because it's common for elected officials who are still in office to get a 30-year embargo period placed on their archives.

Copyright 2018 KUNC

Scott Franz is a government watchdog reporter and photographer from Steamboat Springs. He spent the last seven years covering politics and government for the Steamboat Pilot & Today, a daily newspaper in northwest Colorado. His reporting in Steamboat stopped a police station from being built in a city park, saved a historic barn from being destroyed and helped a small town pastor quickly find a kidney donor. His favorite workday in Steamboat was Tuesday, when he could spend many of his mornings skiing untracked powder and his evenings covering city council meetings. Scott received his journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is an outdoorsman who spends at least 20 nights a year in a tent. He spoke his first word, 'outside', as a toddler in Edmonds, Washington. Scott visits the Great Sand Dunes, his favorite Colorado backpacking destination, twice a year. Scott's reporting is part of Capitol Coverage, a collaborative public policy reporting project, providing news and analysis to communities across Colorado for more than a decade. Fifteen public radio stations participate in Capitol Coverage from throughout Colorado.
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