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The White House: Off Limits to Historians?
Meredith Fuchs, the general counsel of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, writes that the Bush administration's hostility towards public access to and preservation of records combined with changes in technology that have transformed the way in which we all communicate are leading to a situation in which "primary sources on the most important decisions and activities in the government may be lost, destroyed, or closed to the public." [emphasis added]
- The White House: Off Limits to Historians? by Meredith Fuchs, Passport: The Newsletter of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (5-1-08), posted at History News Network on Thursday, May 8, 2008.
[O]ver the last seven years there have been a series of moves by the current administration that may ensure that the records of the White House and the federal offices and agencies that work closely with the White House will not be available to historians.Continue reading
Agencies not complying with record preservation policies
Agencies not complying with record preservation policies, By Jill R. Aitoro, NextGov, April 24, 2008.
At the hearing, Linda Koontz, director of information management issues at the Government Accountability Office, released preliminary results from an ongoing GAO study of how four agencies managed e-mail and electronic records. ...Koontz said the agencies print and then file e-mails, but about half of senior officials were not following these procedures, and the e-mails for these officials were maintained in e-mail systems that lacked record-keeping capabilities, such as the ability to group the e-mails using a classification system.The House is considering the Electronic Communications Preservation Act, which would strengthen policies for preservation of government records including White House e-mails. Gary Stern, general counsel for NARA said that the legislation's potential cost to agencies could be "astronomical," and noted the bill's requirement that the National Archives would maintain authority over the White House's electronic records might be unconstitutional. Patrice McDermott, director of OpentheGovernment.org, said:
"I understand the constitutional issues, and I don't have a good answer for that.... But one of the concerns is that there is no way to enforce accountability [of] records management in the White House. We understand it's a difficult dance [for NARA]. They're there at the invitation of the White House in many cases, but there needs to be some way for the outside community to hold the White House accountable."Continue reading
NARA will NOT harvest at end of current administration
According to a post on .govwatch (The National Archives Is Quietly Destroying Millions of Documents April 08, 2008 by Coby Logen), a recent memo at the National Archives and Records Administration says:
After considering our other records management program priorities for FY 2008, availability of harvested web content at other "archiving" sites (e.g., www.archive.org), and the resources required for conducting and preserving a government-wide web snapshot, NARA has determined that we will not conduct a web harvest or snapshot at the end of the current Administration.Logen says that "Not capturing federal web sites now may mean losing millions of web pages authored under the Bush administration when leadership changes in January 2009." John Wonderlich at the Sunlight Foundations comments that "The fact that digital preservation is done by others outside NARA isn't an excuse for NARA to abdicate their responsibility, but an argument that they should be capable of fulfilling it." (Digital Preservation Under Threat? by John Wonderlich on April 9, 2008) This seems yet another example of the government saying it cannot and therefore it won't. (The NARA/TGN contract as a bad precedent). Call it the Katrina of digital preservation? The New York Times sums up the underlying issue nicely yesterday: "In Storing 1's and 0's, the Question Is $" (By John Schwartz, New York Times, April 9, 2008). It is not a technological issue; it is an issue of funding and policy and control. (See: The Technical is Political.) Continue reading
Can we identify or verify or prevent government website scrubbing?
One issue we at FGI are concerned about is that, when government information is not officially distributed to depository libraries and when official digital government information is available only from government-controlled web servers, then that information can (intentionally or unintentionally) be deleted or altered leaving historians, journalists, economists and other citizens with no clear, complete record of government activities.
From time to time there are stories about government websites being "scrubbed," i.e., of information being removed from them, but it is often difficult to determine if these stories are accurate. Since stories like this are often (perhaps, usually) published to make a political point, discussion of them often revolves around the political issue rather than the issue of the integrity and permanence of government information in the larger sense.
One such story this week gives us an opportunity to at least quickly and superficially examine the existence of a problem, if not its extent:
- White House Scrubs Web Site on the Economy, Perrspectives [Jon Perr], March 20, 2008.
Perr says that a flash animation and a paragraph on tax cuts, which were on the White House Jobs and Economic Growth web page (also referred to as the "Economy & Budget Policies in Focus" web page) on March 16, 2008, were removed and no longer available on March 20. The animation said:
- "18,000 jobs created in December 2007,"
- "Over 8.3 million new jobs created since August 2003"
- "Unemployment rate remains low at 5%."
- "President Bush's actions are moving our economy forward"
And the deleted paragraph read:
President Bush Continues To Call On Congress To Further Reduce Economic Uncertainty By Making His Tax Relief Permanent.
President Bush believes the most important action to ensure the long-term health of our economy is to make sure the tax relief that is now in place is made permanent. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are set to expire in less than three years. If Congress allows that to happen, 116 million taxpayers will see their taxes go up by $1,800 on average, and we will see an end to many of the measures that have helped our economy grow – including the 10 percent individual income tax bracket, reductions in the marriage penalty, the expansion of the child tax credit, and reduced rates on regular income, capital gains, and dividends.
Perr discoverd that MSN has a cached copy of that page (dated 3/8/2008) that includes the animation and text. This morning, I used WebCite to make a copy of the MSN copy. (The WebCite copy does not do a good job of retaining the layout of the original, but the Flash animation is there and viewable as is the text paragraph and should remain there even after MSN removes its cached copy.)
I checked the Internet Archive, but the most recent snapshot of www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/economy/ as of this morning is June 7, 2007. I did some Google searching and was not able to locate the Flash animation, but I was able to locate a series, of nearly identical ones:
- 30 Straight Months of Job Gains Unemployment rates are below the ...
- 29 Straight Months of Job Gains Unemployment rates are below the ...
- 24 Straight Months of Job Gains Unemployment rate drops to lowest ...
- 20 Straight Months of Job Gains Unemployment rate drops to lowest ...
- 92000 Jobs Created in July 2007 Unemployment Rate Remains Low at ...
If Google is an accurate way to judge the content of whitehouse.gov, it would appear that, the White House has maintained earlier versions of this animation but has not preserved this more recent one. But, we do not know how accurate or comprehensive or current Google is.
I also browsed the White House News releases for March 2008 page, because it appeared that similar information had migrated to various "Fact Sheets." Indeed, the text paragraph is in the March 7, 2008 Fact Sheet: Taking Responsible Action to Keep Our Economy Growing. I was not able to find a link to the animations, however.
This brings me to the question: "Can we identify or verify or prevent government website scrubbing?" My own tentative conclusions are:
- We cannot prevent the government from changing its own websites, so we cannot prevent "scrubbing."
- We can verify that a site has changed, but currently our tools are limited to a) commercial web crawlers (like google, MSN and Internet Archive, and b) individuals who regularly monitor websites, and c) web crawlers created by libraries using their own tools or those provided by others (such as Archive-it).
- While tools exist to monitor changes in a web site (e.g., Change Detection), I don't believe that we can use these to look for significant (e.g., loss-of-information) alterations.
What conclusions can we draw from all this? Since we do not know how commercial indexers such as Google and MSN work and what their criteria are and since they do not have preservation as a mission, we can hardly rely on them. While this particular example may be trivial in itself, it demonstrates that government information in the digital age, the "e-government" age, is volatile and fragile and that we do not have a system in place that is as reliable for digital content as the FDLP libraries were for non-digital content. While it is hard to imagine a system that would be robust enough to catch every single digital bit of government information from every agency for all time, it is possible to imagine a system that would capture much more than we do now.
That leads me to a conclusion that we at FGI have long advocated: Libraries should be building collections of digital government information and GPO should facilitate this by depositing government information in FDLP libraries. If libraries created collections that could be text-mined by scholars and researchers, it would be possible to better audit, analyze, and preserve government information and make it more difficult for information to be scrubbed without being discovered and exposed. Indeed, it would remove, to some extent, the motivation to "scrub" if it was well know that the information was preserved and easily discoverable.
The question we should be asking ourselves is: How much are we losing every day? The task is too big for any one library or any one government agency (i.e., GPO). And it is not a task that commercial entities like Google and MSN are likely to take on.
Continue readingA Wiki Grows at EPA
The February 4, 2008 issue of Government Computer News carries an interesting interview:
Molly O'Neill | EPA the Web 2.0 way
GCN Interview By Joab Jackson
http://www.gcn.com/print/27_3/45741-1.html?topic=&CMP=OTC-RSS
The article talks about some of the EPA's experiments with web 2.0 technologies including wikis. One of the wikis arose out of the Puget Sound Information Challenge:
So we decided to use the mashup camp as our staging area for the wiki. We had a form on the wiki site that you could download, fill out and send in. We also sent up an e-mail address and a phone number.
It was a little scary because we hadn’t told anyone about this beforehand. What if no one contributed? That wasn’t a problem — we had so many people interested and providing useful information.
We had people building applications. National librarians were culling data for library resources. We had people help organize it. The interesting thing was to watch how many hits we were getting through social networking. People took my e-mail and sent it to other people, who sent it off to even more people. We had a blog from Germany weigh in. We had over 17,000 page views and 175 good contributions.
We learned a lot, and we delivered something as well — in fact, several of us are going to Seattle to meet with the council to talk about these tools. They have to write a strategic plan, so maybe they could write a strategic plan with the wiki online. Instead of spending months trying to gather data, they could do it a lot faster using social networking.
Wikis are interesting animals as government documents. While they are very changable, wikis carry their own version control. Think about what implications that might have if you think a wiki is worth saving for preservation. Would you try to copy every version? Take a snapshot once a month? Or decide it was ephemera you didn't need? We'd like to know what you think. If you'd like to see EPA's Puget Sound wiki for yourself, please visit http://pugetsound.epageo.org/.
As a tool for quickly gathering community input, I think EPA is onto something. Especially if most contributers are identified. It would become easier to distinguish special interest group input from regular community input. Or at least the potential is there.
Aside from the wiki, the interview has a great insight from Ms. O'Neill that I think has relevancy to the library community. She is asked "Why do you think federal agencies have such a hard time disseminating information on the Web? " and the last part of her answer is:
But the third reason is that we tend to organize data in a way that it makes sense to us. Although this is changing a little bit now, at EPA we still primarily organize our data by how we are organized as an agency. People outside the agency don’t think of things that way. They get frustrated because they want all the information about a subject, like climate change or environmental indicators. So where do they go? We’re doing a lot to improve search on our site. When you do a search on the main page, it will give you folder options. When you type in “waste water,” it will organize by folder topics like stormwater or industrial effluent.
This is both warning and opportunity for libraries. The warning is that we also tend to organize data in a way that makes sense to us in databases (catalogs) that make sense to us but not to users. But the good news is that one of the ways we organize materials is by subject. And documents librarians are very good about searching across agency boundaries for materials. It's one of the many ways we add value to government information.
Continue reading
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