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A plea to make public records retention digital

Real-Time Sunshine Government Technology, March 2005 By Paul W. Taylor.

Open records laws — driven by citizen initiatives at the ballot box three decades ago as government accountability measures — were intended to prevent the last scandal from happening again, tens of thousands of exemptions notwithstanding. Erring on the side of caution, paper, microfilm, microfiche and digital records on various media are put in archival boxes, never to be seen again….

The public record is effectively lost to obscurity at a time when real advances are being made to broaden the circulation of literature and library holdings by bringing the world of wood pulp to the World Wide Web….

There is still time and considerable urgency to make the unique, authoritative public record held by government a primary source online. Citizens expect it, the historic values of transparency demand it, and government will be conspicuous in its absence if it fails to make it so….

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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