Kentucky Shows How to Publish and Deposit Government Documents
The State of Kentucky has developed a best-practices manual for publishing -- and depositing -- government documents digitally.
- Kentucky State Government Publications Handbook, Kentucky Department for Libraries & Archives. Frankfort, KY (June 2008) Edition 1.0
The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives (KDLA) has been the official repository for Kentucky state agency publications since 1958 ...Kentucky state agencies are required to send their publications to KDLA. The Public Records Division (PRD) and State Library Services (SLS) at KDLA work together not only to provide access to the valuable information contained in state agency publications, but also to preserve the publications for future generations.The handbook says that "Electronic publications should be forwarded in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)." We would love to see all U.S. government publications in PDF format deposited in FDLP libraries. It would be a great first step toward digital deposit of all government information. Continue reading
NARA Nears Completion of Ingesting Bush Records
NARA Nears Completion of Ingesting Bush Records, National Coalition for History (Sept 4, 2009).
The National Archives and Records Administration announced this week that the agency has nearly completed the process of loading the electronic records of President George W. Bush into the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system. To date, more than 85% of the total volume has been ingested. ...The intake of these records is expected to be complete by the end of September, 2009. Currently, the use of the system is limited to Presidential Libraries staff...See also: Archives reports progress on road to digital ERA, by Max Cacas, Federal News Radio, (Sept. 3, 2009). Continue reading
White House Will Post Visitor Logs Online
On September 3, the Obama administration and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) settled four ongoing cases regarding public access to White House visitor records. As a result, for the first time in history records of White House visitors will be released. President Obama issued a statement saying that each month, records of visitors from the previous 90-120 days will be made available online.
- White House Will Post Visitor Logs Online, National Journal, "Tech Daily Dose" (September 4, 2009).
- Obama Administration To Release White House Visitor Records, National Coalition for History (September 4th, 2009).
- White House Takes Huge Step Toward Transparency, By Ellen Miller, Sunlight Foundation (09/04/09).
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).
Happy Labor Day, U.S.!
September 7, 2009 is Labor Day in the U.S., where it is celebrated by not laboring. It's Friday noon on the East Coast, and already I see the drop-off in emails and tweets. Get the facts from: Labor Day Facts for Features from the Census Bureau Labor Day press packet from the Labor Department Continue reading