As part of a the British Economic and Social Research Council’s “Social Science Week,” the UK Social Science Information Gateway is sponsoring a forum of invited papers called Social Sciences Online: Past, Present and Future to look at how the Internet is changing the face of social science research.
One paper that will be of interest to government information specialists in this country is e-Government Information: the same old problem … newly digitized! by Alastair J. Allan, University of Sheffield.
While focusing on the UK, many of his observations are relevant here in the U.S. as well. He looks at barriers to access in the digital age. Among his findings:
The need to maintain full and accessible archives is becoming even more of a problem than it was twenty years ago. Once the archiving function was taken care of by the large national and university libraries but now the individual sites have to ensure that the archives are maintained and, frankly, many sites lack both the ability and ambition to do so.
The article and others are open for comments until Friday 1st July when a general roundup of the discussion will be posted.
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