Alaska State Library Archiving Governor Palin’s Resignation Announcement and End of Term Website
Submitted by archive on Tue, 2009-07-28 16:00.
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s resignation announcement earlier this month and the transition of power to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell gave the Alaska State Library a great chance to preserve this "at risk" content.
Using Archive-It and the manual "start on demand" feature inside the web application the Alaska State Library crawled Governor Palin and Lt. Governor Parnell's web sites on the eve of the transition of power and was
able to capture valuable information that is now offline and no longer accessible.
The Alaska State Library’s Alaska Governor/Lt. Governor Web Sites collection was originally conceived to archive these government websites over time. Once Sarah Palin left office, the governor’s website changed to reflect Sean Parnell as governor, and the lieutenant governor’s
website changed to reflect Craig Campbell as lieutenant governor. Thus all of the information on former Governor Palin’s website as well as speeches and press releases from Sean Parnell’s time as lieutenant governor are no longer available on the live web.
The foresight of the staff of the Alaska State Library and the availability of the Archive-It web archiving service made it possible to preserve the final changes to these "at risk" websites before they were taken offline.
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Public official black holes
This is a good example of why librarian archivists are important. However, the practice of removing documents when a political administration has ended seems to me improper, though. Surely we should have permanent public access to documentation of prior administrations without having to depend on individual rescues like this? These are taxpayer-funded resources, aren't they?
Just doing our statutory jobs
In this particular case it wasn't an individual rescue. We (the Alaska State Library) are the designated agency to acquire, describe and provide permanent public access to published state agency material. Our charge comes from Alaska Statute 14.56.090-180. We have archived the web sites of every "web era" Governor starting with Governor Tony Knowles.
More information about our archiving efforts can be found at http://askasl.blogspot.com/2009/07/end-of-term-palinparnell-web-snapshot.html.
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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.
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