National Archives Cuts Back On Web Site Archiving

hhavensteincw writes "The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is coming under fire for a new policy to stop the "harvesting" of a digital snapshot of all federal agency and Congressional Web sites after every Presidential and Congressional term. NARA, which archived more than 75 million Web sites in 2004 after George Bush's first term ended, will not harvest agency and Congressional Web sites when his current term is over because it says agencies are supposed to be archiving Web content on their own. But NARA has been criticized by some for opting out of preserving these important historical archives on the Web."

Its not History

If you dont document it.

interesting in consideration.....

... the price of storage dropping as it has.

So what is the real reason for this? Its certainly not cost.

Is it possible that nobody is interested in the data?

Re:interesting in consideration.....

Is it possible that nobody is interested in the data?

People may not be interested in the data now, but as time passes, it will become more and more important. I am a bit surprised that the National Archives and the Library of Congress collect so little of the American cultural heritage. In Iceland, where I live, the National Library collects everything on the national TLD (is) three times a year, important sites are crawled more frequently. I know that the US web is several orders of magnitude larger than the Icelandic web. One would however assume that the resources available to the NARA and LC are significantly larger than what the Icelandic National Library has to spend on collecting websites. Collecting a subset of the US web every four years should be well within the means of the US government.

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One would however assume that the resources available to the NARA and LC are significantly larger than what the Icelandic National Library has to spend on collecting websites.

Oh god, I laughed so hard.

Re:interesting in consideration.....

I think we all know that the less history remembers of George W Bush's term as president of the free world, the better off we will look in our children's eyes. If he gets lucky he might get off easy with a 'worst president to ever hold the office' footnote.

Re:interesting in consideration.....

If he gets lucky he might get off easy with a 'worst president to ever hold the office' footnote.

Of course, like with Nixon, you will still have slavering beasties defending him for the next few decades and blaming everything on liberals and campus radicals.

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Well, if you can tell me what part of a) opening up dialogue with pinko, commie China and b) getting OUT of Vietnam where Kennedy and Johnson (both "liberals," last time I checked) makes Nixon a "conservative," then please let me know.

Nixon was not a left

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I think we all know that the less history remembers of George W Bush's term as president of the free world, the better off we will look in our children's eyes.

Far better our children be aware of history, so they might be less inclined to repeat it.

Looking good in the eyes of another is not nearly as desirable as acting good and eliminating that worry.

Wrong Time to Quit

The NARA should not be considering quitting right when the Bush regime is caught red-handed deleting vast amounts of incriminating digital content that it was legally required to archive.

If anything, NARA should be required to archive even more now, to guard against losing the unique copies at the other ends of official communications and publications. It should upgrade to a policy of redundant archivers keeping separate copies under separate policies, so that a rogue Executive can't flip one switch and toss all the evidence of their actions into the fire.

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I'm not certain if you read TFA (or TFS, for that matter), but these are public websites that the NARA was archiving. They were doing it ONCE every term. If you want to see just what the NARA was doing, click on "Cached" on Google's search page...same id

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I'm familiar with NARA's archiving, and how they're thinking of turning it over to the Internet Archive.org. But there's a difference between publishing and archiving. Yes, those websites are available to the public, but if there isn't a mandated archiving

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I think something is better than nothing. That volume of evidence and "virality" of distribution means that even a snapshot will preserve traces that are hard to totally expunge from the entire Federal government's public records. But if that snapshot isn'

Re:Wrong Time to Quit

The NARA should not be considering quitting right when the Bush regime is caught red-handed deleting vast amounts of incriminating digital content that it was legally required to archive.

Am I the only one who read this story and thought that maybe the NARA isn't choosing to do this? I think it's a mighty strange coincidence that they'd be doing this on their own in the last year of a presidency that, for the past seven years, has shown a willful disregard for the law, especially when it comes to the administration's own recordkeeping. Dubya's White House has made the missing files associated with the Clintons look like a single lost receipt by comparison.

p

Should we be surprised . . .

It really should not come as a surprise that yet another federal agency has decided not to do its job, but only what it wants to do. . . The reality of the situation is simple, the web is becoming a major communications method for the government, and the

Easy answer

Take whatever budget they have for the web archive and give it to archive.org, let them do the work. Include some long term DVD tech to stash at the library of congress. If the gov't can't do its job, pay someone else to do it.

These archives are useless....

Any archives done by the government are useless because those who control the government can modify them if they so desire. This data needs to be archived by multiple independent private parties.

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White house email [wired.com], for instance. (And yes, the link references "lost" email by both Bush and Clinton).

The national archives exists for exactly this.

their job is to archive public records. Every document produced by the US government is public record unless classified.

Repetative?

Doesn't google do this already on their own servers?

National Archives have become redundant

why should the national archives repeat all the captured page loads that FBI and NSA are getting from the big telecom providers?...they don't just spy on your e-mail you know.

doublespeak

Back when archives.org was archiving whitehouse.gov, we saw changes in speeches to match the current rationales etc. Is this why they don't want to archive?

--Sam

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Was archiving whitehouse.gov? AFAICS, archive.org still is [archive.org].

Problem is bigger than Natl. Archives.

Private archiving, (e.g. archive.org) coverage is not what it once was either, though maybe for different reasons.

More and more operators are choosing to protect their "intellectual property" using robots exclude, noarchive, or similar policies.

More an

To be a historian in 100 years...

I have studied a bit of history at the University level and I am not sure whether the digital age will make that job easier or harder in the future. With the overwhelming amount of online content in blogs and such it will be easier to find accounts of even

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independance

i do not wish to be exposed to your dance in Depends{tm}