NARA Is Not Preserving History – This Time

Barbara Quint, a very cool woman who writes for one of my employer’s publications, has written great article about NARA – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration – will NOT be making a new archive/snapshot of government websites in 2009 the way they did in 2001 and 2005 after the new Presidential terms began.

In 2009, more than in 2005, we can hope to see major changes across a wide swath of government websites.  It is very important to let Americans see those changes and understand the differences that can come about with a change in leadership in this nation.   Luckily, a few other organizations are stepping in to do the job.

Consortium—Minus NARA—Archiving Bush Administration Websites
by Barbara Quint
Posted On August 28, 2008

---

Regardless of who wins this November’s presidential election, the business of government still chugs along. Or does it? With so much of the daily activity of the federal government now conducted on the web, the effect of a change of administration becomes a matter of curiosity or even anxiety. In 2001 and 2004, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA; www.archives.gov) created a “snapshot” crawl of federal agency websites (109th Congress and 2004 presidential term available at www.webharvest.gov). However, in March, NARA announced it would not conduct the same kind of snapshot for 2008/2009. Responding to the possible loss of an historically important record, five agencies and organizations– the Library of Congress (LC; www.loc.gov), Internet Archive (www.archive.org), California Digital Library (www.cdlib.org), University of North Texas Libraries (www.library.unt.edu), and the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO; www.gpo.gov) –have partnered to take on the task.

Each of the participants will concentrate on specific approaches to gathering and curating the collection of content from federal agency websites under LC’s leadership. The bulk of the collecting will come from a sequence of crawls by the Internet Archive. LC will contribute congressional content based on its regular monthly crawls, which it has conducted since 2003. The California Digital Library (CDL) and the University of North Texas (UNT) are already participants in the LC-funded Web-at-Risk project. They will tap their own considerable experience to identify key agency content. The UNT Libraries, already a model organization for digital archiving of government sites with its CyberCemetery
(http://govinfo.library.unt.edu) begun in 1997, have developed a specific program designed to handle input from expert government document librarians around the country for identifying and suggesting key “not to be missed” sites. Assisting in this curation side of the effort, GPO will promote the program within the Federal Depository Library Program.

Read the rest at Consortium—Minus NARA—Archiving Bush Administration Websites