What is a government information librarian to do during these times when the very public information we base our daily work around is being redacted, cleansed, and deleted? First, make yourself aware of all the work that is already being done (and has been being done since 2008 and before). Our friend and PEGI colleague Lynda Kellam has helpfully created a growing google document of the efforts currently underway to collect and preserve federal government information and data.
Then, what can each of us do, at our libraries, to make sure that government information, once published, is collected, described, preserved, and made freely and publicly available? Here are some things that EVERY government information librarian (regardless of the size of the organization they work for) can do.
1) Send in “unreported” documents to GPO. The executive branch is rife with unreported documents that should be part of the FDLP but have slipped through the ever-growing cracks. We should be absolutely flooding GPO with unreported documents for them to catalog and preserve. It’s quick and easy to do by following the directions on the FDLP website. And the form includes a space to attach a digital file so make sure to do that as well.
EVERY FDLP librarian should agree to track at least one federal agency and submit at least 10 unreported documents to GPO every week. We can’t assure long-term preservation of government information unless we ALL do this. Perhaps GPO or GODORT can help coordinate this? Maybe we can use govdoc-l to announce and update our commitments.
2) Use the Internet Archive’s “save page now” tool to save every .gov page that you visit. IA will crawl and preserve every one of these in the Wayback Machine. It’s quick and easy – and fun! – to copy/paste the url into the “save page now” tool and watch wayback do its work! And it’ll even save that page to your own personal web archive (if you’ve created a free “library card” and are logged in to the site!). You can create your own web archive of important websites. And you can install their free browser extensions to save web pages with a single click. In short, be a librarian! See something save something! Use every method open to you to participate in preserving government information that your users rely on. Dedicate time and energy (and the time and energy of your library) to long-term access to government information. GPO, LC, and NARA can’t do it by themselves.
3) Donate to the Internet Archive. (we are NOT IA staff!) It’s time to put our money where our livelihoods are. The Internet Archive does yeoman’s work to preserve the web. They have long put their valuable resources, infrastructure, technology, and staff time towards making sure the End of Term Archive is successful in collecting as much of the .gov/.mil web domain as they can. And they have started a new project called Democracy’s Library to collect the world’s born-digital web based government information and digitize historic government information. So you NEED to pitch in to help their efforts. Skip one or two Starbucks coffees and send them $10 a month. Every little bit helps them be able to continue to do their valuable work.
4) If you work for a library or organization that has an institutional repository and/or digital infrastructure, then advocate with your administration to put that repository and infrastructure toward the common good of hosting local copies of documents and mirroring important data sets.
5) And if your institution has some budgetary and infrastructure wherewithal (and especially if your institution is already a LOCKSS member!), please consider joining the LOCKSS-USDOCS project. The project just had its 16th birthday of distributed preservation of all content on GOVINFO (and FDsys and GPOaccess before that!).
In short, be a librarian! Use every method open to you to participate in preserving government information that your users rely on. Dedicate time and energy (and the time and energy of your library) to long-term access to government information.
These are short-term strategies for things that all of us can do RIGHT NOW and we still need to use this current historical moment as an opportunity to develop a long term strategy for building a Digital Preservation Infrastructure for government information.
Finally: GPO, if you’re listening, please store a copy of EVERY document you catalog and provide a link to your stored copy. Whole websites are being deleted from the web and the only way to assure long-term access is to store a copy. Don’t POINT to a document when you should be COLLECTING every document which is your legal and statutory purview.
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