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What is wrong with this picture?
The Executive Office of the President is looking for a private company to archive some of its presidential records. The records in question are those published by EOP on publicly-accessible web sites including social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Does this strike anyone else as indicative of a major problem with how the government is approaching records retention and preservation? Will they just call it "outsourcing" and hope that magic word makes all the questions go away? Wouldn't it be easier, more comprehensive, and more authoritative for the government to capture its own records on the way to social networking sites? Its workflow of a) posting to commercial services, b) paying contractors to extract content from those servers and c) reformat it for preservation sounds like very bad planning to me. Surely we need governments to start taking their own communications seriously and create preservable records rather than try to re-create records in order to preserve them. The idea of creating hard-to-preserve records using commercial services and having to go through extra steps to re-capture and re-format the information is doing two things wrong instead of one thing right.
- Web Archive, Solicitation Number: WHO-S-09-0003, Agency: Executive Office of the President, FedBizOps (Aug 21, 2009).
- Administration wants help archiving its Facebook, Twitter content, By Ben Bain, Federal Computer Week (Sep 02, 2009)
- Administration issues solicitation to archive social media content, By Gautham Nagesh, NextGov (09/03/2009).
LJ interviews LoC
Library Journal has an interesting set of interviews with Library of Congress staff Michelle Springer (on Flickr Commons, Twitter, and blogging), Sally McCallum (on Linked Data and SKOS [Simple Knowledge Organization System]), and Bill LeFurgy (on cloud storage and preservation).
- Stacking the Tech: The Library of Congress Talks Digital Initiatives, by Ellyssa Kroski, Library Journal (8/6/2009).
Q.) What type of an impact do you think cloud computing could have on the library field? A.) It has great potential. Cloud computing offers the prospect of a distributed preservation infrastructure, which is vital because no single institution can handle the job alone. Most cultural heritage organizations lack the resources and the capabilities to preserve large amounts of digital content—and the volume of data worthy of preservation is growing by the day. Libraries will need to work together as part of a collaborative network to achieve the necessary economy of scale. Services like cloud computing fit nicely within this collaborative concept.Continue reading
U.S. Government use of dot-com social media sites
The General Services Administration (GSA) has been negotiating terms of service agreements with social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube so that federal agencies can use of these social media tools without violating federal regulations. See news coverage here:
- GSA signs deals for agencies to use social networking sites, by Jill R. Aitoro, NextGov, 03/25/2009.
- GSA Signs Facebook Agreement, by Gautham Nagesh, TechInsider, 04/29/09.
- GSA social media TOS review, Joshua Tauberer’s Blog, May 29th, 2009.
While I am encouraged by the GSA’s forward thinking to make use of the latest technologies developed in the private sector, I believe that working with the private sector poses a number of risks to government data, to the public’s privacy and free speech rights, and to good governance. These risks can be minimized and some useful provisions have been included in the negotiated TOS’s along these lines, but far more careful thinking is necessary. While several of the TOS addressed accessibility and privacy concerns, none of the TOS addressed security, nondiscrimination, archival access to media, the TOS the public are required to enter into to access government content through these services, and web media data formats.Continue reading
Losh’s “From the Crowd to the Cloud: Social Media in the Obama Administration”
Dr. Elizabeth Losh, digital rhetoric scholar at U.C. Irvine, presents her research on how government agencies are using social media and how their use impacts government information and the public record. Video of presentation (~68 minutes) Presentation Slides Continue reading
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