National Archives Cuts Back On Web Site Archiving 45
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
interesting in consideration..... (Score:4, Interesting)
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..... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:interesting in consideration..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:interesting in consideration..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Frankly, I'd have thought the bastard would be more palatable to lefties than to the Buckley crowd -- then again, it may just be that the neocons have confused the definitions so much as to make them meaningless.
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Nixon was not a leftie by any stretch of the imagination. Opening up a dialogue with Communist China was about realpolitik, not ideology. Plus, Communist China was hardly a bastion of liberalism. It was/is an autocratic regime. You seem to be confusing Communism and Socia
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Honestly, I'm not pro-Bush by any stretch of the imagination, but the NARA's decision is NOT going to help the Bush "regime" hide anything that wasn't already readily accessible to the public.
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The dropping from inadequate archiving to none has crossed a threshold where people are now paying attention and demanding adequacy. The inadequacy of the prior policy means that both those in power in the Bush regime and m
Re:Wrong Time to Quit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Should we be surprised . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
Easy answer (Score:1)
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i do not wish to be exposed to your dance in Depends{tm}
These archives are useless.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The national archives exists for exactly this. (Score:5, Informative)
Repetative? (Score:1)
National Archives have become redundant (Score:2)
Agencies are supposed to be documenting their own? (Score:1)
doublespeak (Score:5, Interesting)
--Sam
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NARA should continue archiving (Score:1)
Halting now and distributing responsibility amongst the various federal agencies will foster a haphazard distorted view of the past.
Other Significant National Archive Redactions (Score:1, Informative)
Right after the 9/11 incident, these records were reclassified. Around the same time, there was a wholesale reclassification of documents in the National Archives going back to WWII, making them unavailable to the public.
Problem is bigger than Natl. Archives. (Score:2, Informative)
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 and more websites use dynamic methods to present data, or use more complex interfaces involving javascript, flash, java, etc that make them technically hard to capture.
Conversations that formerly occurred on usenet now happen on proprietary bulletin board
Yes, but... (Score:1)
Um, are these agencies the same ones that were supposed to be archiving all their e-mail as well? You know, the e-mail that was all conveniently deleted according to "procedure" just before it was needed in a major congressional investigation?
To be a historian in 100 years... (Score:2)
NARA Response (Score:1)