Home » Posts tagged 'digital preservation' (Page 22)

Tag Archives: digital preservation

Our mission

Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.

Internet Archive proposal for mass digitization

I had known that the Internet Archive had submitted a response to the GPO's RFP for mass digitization. A friend just sent me the link to the proposal submitted to GPO (embedded below and here's the link to the proposal and supporting documents). As you can probably guess, we've been pulling for the Archive to get the bid, not least of which because the Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit library and we've stated on more than one occasion that privatization of public domain government information is a very bad idea. But also, we've been heartened by the quality of the Archive's scans to date, their openness and willingness to be collaborative in their processes and data access and sharing. Those qualities certainly come through in their proposal for mass digitization -- not to mention the fact that they've actually made their proposal public! While the award has not been officially announced, we really hope that the Archive wins the award. Perhaps GPO will name them as an official depository library and work with them not only on the "legacy" collection (there needs to be a better description of the deep and rich collections of depository libraries than the somewhat pejorative "legacy" :-| ) but on digital deposit of government documents going forward. --that is all.

Continue reading

Continue Reading →

Recent report on Link Rot

A recent report evaluating a two-year web harvesting project found that 14.3 percent of the original URLs of all titles harvested from the Web and archived during the first year of project had become inactive within at least one year of harvesting. (p.33)

The report is an evaluation of the Legal Information Archive of The Chesapeake Project, which was designed to preserve born-digital legal information published directly to the Web. The project was implemented in early 2007 by the Georgetown Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia. The report notes that more than 95 percent of the titles in the sample were PDF files. Of these titles, 8.2 percent were found to have inactive original URLs in 2008 and 14.1 percent in 2009. (p.35) Ten percent of government (.gov) URLs became inactive in the first year and an additional three percent became inactive in the second year. (p.34) The report concludes:
More than 4,300 digital items, representing nearly 1,900 titles, have been harvested from the Web and archived, and roughly 14 percent of these titles have already been removed from their original locations on the Web, demonstrating the importance and effectiveness of the project’s efforts. Moreover, the project’s access figures demonstrate both the broad, international reach of the project’s efforts, as well as the successful selection of high-interest and high-use materials by project participants.
Continue reading

Continue Reading →

Alaska State Library Archiving Governor Palin’s Resignation Announcement and End of Term Website

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s resignation announcement earlier this month and the transition of power to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell gave the Alaska State Library a great chance to preserve this "at risk" content.  Using Archive-It and the manual "start on demand" feature inside the web application  the Alaska State Library crawled Governor Palin and Lt. Governor Parnell's web sites on the eve of the transition of power and was  able to capture valuable information that is now offline and no longer accessible. The Alaska State Library’s Alaska Governor/Lt. Governor Web Sites collection was originally conceived to archive these government websites over time.  Once Sarah Palin left office, the governor’s website changed to reflect Sean Parnell as governor, and the lieutenant governor’s website changed to reflect Craig Campbell as lieutenant governor. Thus all of the information on former Governor Palin’s website as well as speeches and press releases from Sean Parnell’s time as lieutenant governor are no longer available on the live web.  The foresight of the staff of the Alaska State Library and the availability of the Archive-It web archiving service made it possible to preserve the final changes to these "at risk" websites before they were taken offline. Continue reading

Continue Reading →

Ten Great Government Web Sites

GCN's list of "great" .gov web sites this year includes GPO's FDsys.

  • Great .Gov Web Sites SPECIAL REPORT: "10 sites that take online government to the next level" by Joab Jackson, Government Computer News (Jul 27, 2009)
Other sites GCN lists include: data.gov, The California Metropolitan Transportation Commission's Transit.511.org, the U.S. State Department, the State of Utah, and Science.gov. While the description of FDsys in the GCN article has no new information for those who have been following its development for years, its presence in the list is notable and important for at least two reasons. First, it is the only one of the ten that emphasizes permanence and long term access. Second, it is revealing to see the technologies that GCN lists for each site. Every site on the list is noted for use of technologies that provide good access and rich content. These include the current batch of usual suspects, from Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, to RSS and Cascading Style sheets; from Wikipedia and Twitter, to Google keyhole Markup Language and ArcGIS. But only FDsys also includes technologies that are specifically designed for long-term preservation and for authenticating content: The Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System, and "Digital signatures." Now if we could just combine that with digital deposit into FDLP libraries, we'd be able to multiply the technical guarantees of long-term free public access to government information by the number of participating FDLP libraries. Continue reading

Continue Reading →

Team Digital Preservation saves the day!

Digital Preservation Europe is in the process of creating a series of short animations introducing and explaining digital preservation problems and solutions for the general public. Their first one is cute. Future ones will be released on their YouTube channel.

Continue reading

Continue Reading →

Latest Posts

Latest Comments

Blogroll

Archives

Meta

Archives

Powered by WordPress / Academica WordPress Theme by WPZOOM