As someone who has worked with EPA since pre-web days, I understand the desire to make their content more easily found.  but it's not clear to me why you'd do that via copies stashed at the Internet Archive, rather than the document URL (on the EPA site) itself? 

After all, EPA has some 750,000 documents, many of which are of transient value at best.  Many of the documents become superceded by new regulations, new interpretation of the rules, new scientific data -- and while that obsolete information probably has SOME historical value, it is not the first thing someone ought to find when they are looking for information on, for instance, the Clean Air Act.

I'm a big believer in social tagging, and look forward to seeing what this experiment accomplishes -- but I'm also a big believer in the idea that the URL IS the document, and should be treated as -- well, perhaps not sacred, but at least with great respect for what it represents, which is the authoritative location of a given document. 

In the case of the EPA, where documents may contain legal interpretations and rulings that directly impact how businesses and individuals behave, this is especially true -- pointing to the "wrong" document can have significant negative consequences for those trying to comply with the regulations.

Hi Scott,

I understand and sympatheize with your concern for authenticity and up-to-date information. These are concerns we at FGI share.

For the purposes of this test, we needed URLs we could guarantee would not be deactivated during our pilot project. That's why we saved the 32 documents to the Internet Archive.

If as a result of this project, social tagging is accepted as a way of improving findability for government documents, I would expect either the agency or some other suitably authenticated copy (GPO, LOCKSS-Distributed FDLP copy, etc) would be the copy of the document tagged.

The agency URL might not be the best place to go because of the volitile nature of information on the web. Some research has suggested that the average web document has an active life between 77 days and 4 years. Even the upper limit isn't very long for people wishing to document government information for longer than a presidential term. See this article for some reasonably up-to-date information on the topic of web volitility:

The Australian Library Journal (2005)
Still lost in cyberspace? Preservation challenges of Australian internet resources
Wendy Smith
http://www.alia.org.au/publishing/alj/54.3/full.text/smith.html

If other people know of more recent studies, please add them to comments.

Finally, let me assure you that FGI has no long term plan to post large volumes of government documents to the Internet Archive. That would be too much effort for any one organization.

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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.