Jim Jacobs and I are pleased to announce the publication of our book Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future. It is available as a free PDF, a free ePub, and a print-book ($20) at https://freegovinfo.info/pgi.
In this book, we examine how preservation practices of the past affect the preservation of digitally published federal government information today, we analyze data to characterize the current scale of government publishing and the gaps in preservation, and we look to the future by charting a path to a distributed Digital Preservation Infrastructure for government information.
We address technical issues without unnecessarily technical jargon. The book is designed to be used by LIS students, front-line librarians and archivists, managers of libraries and archives, government workers who publish and preserve government information, and policy makers who design laws and regulations that affect the production, dissemination and preservation of government information.
Early praise for Preserving Government Information:
If you want to understand the breadth of published government information, this book explains it. If you would like a deeper understanding about why it is important to preserve government information, this book convinces you. If you’re considering helping to preserve government information, this book will motivate you and show you the ways. If you’re working to preserve government information, this book will help you become more effective. Written by two of the nation’s leading and well-respected government documents experts, this thorough work is uncannily timely. Preserve Government information, preserve the record of government actions.
–David Rosenthal and Victoria Reich, co-founders, LOCKSS
Our times practically scream for this crucial book from Jacobs and Jacobs. Long respected for their expertise with data, government information, and libraries, the authors apply their considerable skills toward the conundrum of preserving digital government information before we watch it disappear. In artfully critiquing many projects, studies, ad hoc groups, and agencies that have gone before, the authors provide a non-technical introduction to what is needed right away: an open digital preservation infrastructure.
Jacobs and Jacobs offer a well-researched distillation of our collective wisdom and our digital and tangible pasts, a mind-opening theoretical review, and thank goodness, a path forward. Their careful, well researched, always critical insights will find an eager readership. Concluding with a principled call to arms, Preserving Government Information stands to become a core reading in many professional settings and in library/information studies.
–Cass Hartnett, U.S. Documents Librarian, University of Washington
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.