Last month, the Internet Archive hosted the 2026 Information Stewardship Forum, which convened a diverse group of practitioners, including librarians, technologists, data consumers, and archivists, dedicated to preserving and expanding access to public and open U.S. government information and data. This cross-sector gathering fostered dialogue and shared understanding by clarifying preservation priorities, mapping existing efforts, and identifying gaps in the Public Information infrastructure (FGI’s book “Preserving Government Information: Past, Present, and Future” scopes out a proposed infrastructure like that).
Out of the three day convening arose some common themes and issues from which a “Preservation of Government Information call to action” — hosted on a new domain for PublicInformationTrust.org! Please read the call to action and consider adding your endorsement and remaining in the loop for next steps in this critical social movement. Questions can be sent to freegovinfo AT gmail DOT com.
The goal of this statement is to bring together this social movement of government information practitioners of all stripes around a set of principles to which everyone can agree on and action items to move this diverse community forward together toward preserving Public Information and building a distributed Digital Preservation Infrastructure (DPI).
“Preservation of Government Information call to action”
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A friend just told me that this new Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on data availability names the critical work of the End of Term Archive (EoT) and goes on to say “Rather than relying on archiving entities to spearhead government-wide preservation of web content every few years, Congress could mandate annual or quarterly web content preservation by agencies as part of agency records management protocols.”
If this is standardized across agencies, it would be absolutely amazing and would go a long way toward answering the second action item on the preservation of govt information action statement!
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48889#_Toc225948124