Poison Pill for Government Web-Site Archivists?
What would happen if projects such as the California Digital Library's project to preserve online government materials were stifled by copyright law?
The CDL project and similar ones could be endangered by aggressive enforcement of copyright law because many government web sites contain copyrighted material.
Now that the Internet Archive is being sued by a healthcare company that says the Internet Archive illegally stored copies of copyrighted materials (Keeper of Expired Web Pages Is Sued Because Archive Was Used in Another Suit By TOM ZELLER Jr. New York Times, July 13, 2005) we cannot help but wonder if similar copyright infringement suits will hurt efforts to preserve government web sites. Continue reading
Practical example of hard to use electronic file
Thanks to Grace York of the University of Michigan Library in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for letting us reprint this insightful GOVDOC-L posting in full for our (hopefully) growing nondepository audience:
People usually give me a blank look when I talk about making format (electronic, fiche, paper) appropriate to an individual document so here's an example.
Confirmation Hearings on Federal Appointments, Part 3 (Senate Judiciary Committee, Y 4.J 89/2:S.hrg. 108-135, pt.3) http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/pdf/108hrg/92548.pdf
This is part of the John G. Roberts confirmation hearing for the D.C. Circuit Court in 2003. It is 1236 pages long and about 41 MB. The Roberts testimony is scattered throughout, not just on a select group of pages. LEXIS Congressional only gives partial coverage of the text.
So, if I were a normal person, I would be nervous about downloading a document that size and I would much prefer to browse the paper to find where his testimony begins and ends, especially after doing a search for ROBERTS within the text using Acrobat. That's what I mean by usability. Continue reading
Preserving records in cyberspace: feds can learn from state archivists
Washington state has a system that preserves electronic records while the National Archives and Records Administration struggles to create its digital archive system. Some wonder why state and federal governments are not collaborating on their efforts on digital preservation. BY Aliya Sternstein. More here Continue reading
Examples of why FOIA matters
The Associated Press has created a page highlighting some of the stories that are made possible by the use of state and federal Freedom of Information Acts (FOIAs). In important cases, FOIA statutes have led to greater accountability, as shown by the AP's example of Georgia:
In Georgia, AP used the state FOI law to obtain the names of state lawmakers and officials who received free football tickets to University of Georgia football games; to discover that Georgia was still providing information to a multi-state crime database after the governor said the state would stop; and to obtain the amazingly easy final exam that Georgia assistant basketball coach Jim Harrick Jr. gave to players. (Harrick was later fired and found guilty of academic fraud by the NCAA.)Continue reading
Government Podcasts Page Updated
We've added podcasts from the State Department, House Democrats, and another California Republican Assembly (State House) member to our new directory of government podcasts. Check the page out, then let us know about any other podcasts coming out of your local, state, or federal government. While government podcasts are an interesting and potentially useful way of distributing government information, they may not become part of the historical record of government. Why? Podcasting uses audio format files, mostly MP3s as of this writing. While MP3 is all over the Internet, it is a propriety format. There is no guarantee that the specifications for the MP3 format will continue to be publicly available. It may become a victim of file format obsolescence, in which case software couldn't be written to successfully read these audio files. Continue reading