Interesting and informative post by our friend, Michael Neubert, a Supervisory Digital Projects Specialist at the Library of Congress:
- Introducing the Federal Web Archiving Working Group, by Michael Neubert, The Signal digital preservation blog of the Library of Congress (February 23, 2015).
Michael comments on the huge amount of born-digital federal government information that is being lost every day:
Today most information that federal government agencies produce is created in electronic format and disseminated over the World Wide Web. Few federal agencies have any legal obligation to preserve web content that they produce long-term and few deposit such content with the Government Publishing Office or the National Archives and Records Administration–such materials are vulnerable to being lost.
He goes on to describe how staff of the GPO, NARA, and the Library of Congress are now meeting monthly to discuss their web harvesting projects.
Managers and staff involved in web archiving from these three agencies have now met five times and have plans to continue meeting on a monthly basis during the remainder of 2015. At the most recent meeting we added a representative from the National Library of Medicine. So far we have been learning about what each of the agencies is doing with harvesting and providing access to federal web sites and why–whether it is the result of a legal mandate or because of other collection development policies. We expect to involve representatives of other federal agencies as seems appropriate over time.
They hope to develop “a shared collective development strategy, if only informally.”
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