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Lost Conversations, Lost Decisions, Lost History

Oliver Bell summarizes the issue of new forms of government communication and the need for new ways of preserving them:

Work needs to begin on archiving standards that will retain the information that is driving decisions today and as technology plays an increasingly larger role in the business of government archiving standards needs to be a core part of systems design, not a problem that we try and solve after the fact.

One important element of this issue is Title 44 of the US Code that defines what GPO and the FDLP can handle. Its definitions limit what we can archive within those boundaries of the FDLP. But… if we had digital deposit, GPO could deposit official Title-44-approved content in FDLP digital libraries and those libraries could combine that content with non-Title-44 (Gov-2.0) content. GPO can’t do this because of the limits of Title 44, but individual FDLP libraries have the flexibility to build their own collections combining Title 44 content with other content. We can do this today without changing the law. But we need digital deposit to make those collections rich and useful.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.


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