Anthony Clark, an independent researcher writing a book on the politics and history of presidential libraries, has written a provocative piece on access to National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) records about administration of Presidential Libraries:

• Why Is It So Hard to Get Documents from the National Archives About the National Archives?, By Anthony Clark, History News Network, July 21, 2008.

Clark claims that NARA is "improperly withholding its own records." He says that as part of NARA's job of overseeing the twelve presidential libraries, it has records that detail the development of the libraries through 1964, when NARA created the Office of Presidential Libraries (NL), but none of NL's records are available. NARA is calling these records "operational," which makes them available only through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Clark quotes Patrice McDermott, Director of OpenTheGovernment.org, as saying, "It is hard to understand how records that are old enough to have been destroyed if the records schedule had been followed can be considered 'operational.' Presidential libraries are an area of keen congressional and public interest and information about them held by NARA should be affirmatively disclosed to the greatest extent possible."

Clark's article has produced an extensive discussion and Comments, including the NARA Response by Gary M. Stern on July 24, 2008.

Kate at ArchivesNext has posted a thoughtful response after talking off the record to archives staff: Access to records of the National Archives, July 24th, 2008.

As we have seen through the conflict and problems of preserving White House e-mail, the law has not kept up with preservation of electronic messages.

A bill (H.R.5811, "The Electronic Message Preservation Act") moving through Congress would address the problems by adding a new Section 2911 to Title 44, Chapter 29. It would require the electronic capture, management, and preservation of electronic records, require that they be readily accessible for retrieval through electronic searches, and would establish mandatory minimum functional requirements for electronic records management systems to ensure compliance with the requirements.

The Bush administration is threatening a veto:

• White House Threatens To Veto House E-Mail Storage Bill, By Dan Friedman, CongressDaily, Jul 9, 2008 (subscription required, but freely available here).

The White House and officials at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) argue that the law gives NARA new responsibility and expands the agency's job from advice to oversight, but the sponsors of the bill say that it only affirms the National Archives' job of advising the White House on record-keeping.

The CongressDaily articles notes that:

A less-discussed but farther-reaching part of the bill updates the Federal Records Act to require federal agencies, also under standards set by the National Archives, to save all e-mail records electronically and create systems to allow electronic searches.

According to GAO and a committee report, most agencies now use "print and file" records systems for keeping e-mail, many of them spotty.

(See National Archives and Selected Agencies Need to Strengthen E-Mail Management, United States Government Accountability Office, GAO-08-742 June 13, 2008.)

A comment in the Committee Report (House Report 110-709, "Electronic Message Preservation Act" 110th Congress 2d Session, June 11, 2008) says:

To make federal agencies comply, I believe this legislation should include enforceable repercussion language. Ms. Patricia McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org suggests this is the only way to make federal agencies comply with the Federal Records Act. Ms. McDermott states that she does not "think anyone has ever been prosecuted for destroying, much less failing to preserve federal records." Just ask former Clinton EPA Director Carol Browner. She supposedly oversaw the destruction of her computer files in violation of a judge's order requiring the agency to preserve its records.

It isn't often you see a discussion FOIA, FBI, NARA, and Records Retention Plan and Disposition Schedules in the popular press. This article describes the frustrations of one researcher when he discovered that records had been destroyed by the FBI.

• The Department of Forgetting: How an obscure FBI rule is ensuring the destruction of irreplaceable historical records, By Alex Heard, Slate, June 24, 2008.

The system's fundamentals make sense, I guess--very complicated sense--but to me the disturbing part comes at the end of the line. At some point 25 years after a case closes, a file that isn't marked "permanent" gets pulled and looked at by one or two people inside the FBI. There are no "knowledgeable representatives of the NARA" monitoring this crucial moment. If it's decided internally that the file isn't important, it's gone.

Michael Ravnitzky, an FOIA researcher based in the Washington, D.C., area, is no fan of the Records Retention Plan and likens it to an open-ended manual for strip-mining a priceless public record. "The FBI got a list of exceptional files given to them by historians, and they said, 'We'll keep that,' " he says. "We'll keep large files. Smaller files, we'll keep a sampling. Everything else gets tossed. That's what the plan is." Based on documents Ivan Greenberg obtained from the FBI, he estimates that 250 million pages were destroyed between 1986 and 1995.

National Archives Reticent About Broadening Mission, by Dan Friedman, CongressDaily, Jun. 2, 2008. [subscription required].
Update: NOW AVAILABLE from NextGov WITHOUT SUBSCRIPTION: http://www.nextgov.com/nextgov/ng_20080602_6498.php

The National Archives (NARA) is being put in an awkward position. Viewed as nonpartisan and professional, it is being tasked by Congress with new enforcement duties. Late last year, a new law passed that set up an "Office of Government Information Services" within the NARA to help set federal Freedom of Information Act policy. Another bill that is expected to pass the House would give NARA a new role requiring NARA to monitor White House e-mail archiving. This would change NARA's role from that of passively receiving records to actively monitoring and enforcing rules. National Archives Inspector General Paul Brachfeld said that "NARA traditionally has not viewed itself as an enforcement entity but rather one that focuses upon collegiality and relationships."

From the article:

Chafing at Bush administration secrecy, congressional Democrats are handing the National Archives and Records Administration new jobs promoting government transparency. Officials at the records agency appear to be balking at taking on unfunded mandates beyond their traditional role. If Congress wants the Archives to become open-government cops, archivists may prefer to remain librarians. "They have always had a narrow view of their mandate and have never been particularly inclined to seek any expansion," said Patrice McDermott of OpentheGovernment.org, a coalition of groups urging government transparency. "They see their mission as providing access to historical records. They see [overseeing] contemporaneous records as a shift."

(cross posted on legalresearchplus.com)

Earlier this month the National Archives and Records Administration released their Strategy for Digitizing Archival Materials for Public Access, 2007-2016. This is a follow-up to a draft policy released in September of last year.

A fair amount of the report discusses the use of partner organizations in the digitization effort. The draft relased in September was open to public comment, and NARA has posted their responses to those comments here.

(Thanks to the American Association of Law Libraries Washington Office and their monthly E-Bulletin)

[I found this interesting news on the wonderful blog: BeSpacific -Erika]

Press Release
(from archives.gov)

May 7, 2008

Washington, DC. . . On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein submitted a report, entitled The Founders Online, to the Committees on Appropriations of the U.S. Congress. This report is the National Archives response to concerns raised by the Committees that the complete papers of America’s Founding Fathers are not available online. The Founders Online is a plan for providing online access, within a reasonable timeframe, to researchers, students and the general public. The report is available electronically at the National Archives website: http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/publications.

In announcing the completion of the report, Professor Weinstein said, “We feel this plan would provide scholars and the public access to the best available versions of the complete papers; it would also protect the longstanding interests of the publishers and host organizations which along with the Federal government have invested great resources in the past four decades. Most importantly, it would build a monument to the Founders of our nation in their own words.”

The National Archives received suggestions from the editors of the papers of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, university publishers, and others in crafting a blueprint for providing access to the already completed print editions and the raw materials for the editions to come. If carried out, the plan ensures that interested readers worldwide can see the work in progress with the already complete editions accompanied by transcriptions of the papers yet to be published. To hasten the transition process, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission plans to invest $250,000 as a demonstration pilot project.

The plan outlines three basic steps that remain:

* Digitizing the existing 217 volumes and publishing the Papers on a single website to allow for research and inquiry across America’s Founding Era collections;

* Transcribing and otherwise preparing for publishing on the web the remaining papers (approximately 90,000 documents) and replacing these raw materials with authoritative annotated versions as these are completed; and

* Creating an independent oversight process to ensure that rigorous performance goals are established and met by the parties carrying out all aspects of the work.

Agencies not complying with record preservation policies, By Jill R. Aitoro, NextGov, April 24, 2008.

At the hearing, Linda Koontz, director of information management issues at the Government Accountability Office, released preliminary results from an ongoing GAO study of how four agencies managed e-mail and electronic records. ...Koontz said the agencies print and then file e-mails, but about half of senior officials were not following these procedures, and the e-mails for these officials were maintained in e-mail systems that lacked record-keeping capabilities, such as the ability to group the e-mails using a classification system.

The House is considering the Electronic Communications Preservation Act, which would strengthen policies for preservation of government records including White House e-mails.

Gary Stern, general counsel for NARA said that the legislation's potential cost to agencies could be "astronomical," and noted the bill's requirement that the National Archives would maintain authority over the White House's electronic records might be unconstitutional.

Patrice McDermott, director of OpentheGovernment.org, said:

"I understand the constitutional issues, and I don't have a good answer for that.... But one of the concerns is that there is no way to enforce accountability [of] records management in the White House. We understand it's a difficult dance [for NARA]. They're there at the invitation of the White House in many cases, but there needs to be some way for the outside community to hold the White House accountable."

Over the past week, there have been some good conversations about government contracts to digitize government information and the National Archives decision to not conduct a web harvest or snapshot at the end of the current Administration. There is good news and bad news.

The good news
The good news is that NARA's decision was not nearly as bad as it appeared to be when it was first announced in a memo on March 27, 2008, which was circulated only to Federal records officers (see: The National Archives Is Quietly Destroying Millions of Documents). In a thoughtful post on its web site (National Archives and Records Administration Web Harvest Background Information, April 15, 2008, NARA; pdf version available), NARA outlines in detail the reasons why it would not conduct an end of administration web snapshot or harvest of Executive Branch websites nor require agencies to do so. The reasons, I think, are sound and in keeping with NARA's commitment to preserving information of historical value.

In addition, the NARA memo of April 15 makes explicit the fact that its decision and memo of March 27 do not apply to Presidential records or to records of the Congress. It says that "NARA will continue to conduct a web harvest of Congressional web sites" and that NARA "will also receive a snapshot of the White House website" noting that "Unlike Federal agencies governed by the Federal Records Act, the White House is governed by the Presidential Records Act, under which all Presidential records are treated as permanent and transferred to NARA for preservation at a Presidential Library."

The NARA "Background Information" document is also, I think, worth reading for its clear description of the shortcomings of web harvests in general. I think it is very useful for us to be reminded of these shortcomings to the extent that we believe we can rely on them as an adequate form of preservation.

In more good news, the NARA/TGN contract is not as bad as it could have been. I mentioned this in my earlier post here (The NARA/TGN contract as a bad precedent) and similar comments have been made in the useful and interesting thread over at ArchivesNext (NARA latest digitization agreement: One archivist's perspective). Merrilee Proffitt, of RLG, says in a comment there that the NARA model for contracts with third parties "actually comes out looking pretty good" when compared to the criteria described in the RLG paper Good Terms - Improving Commercial-Noncommercial Partnerships for Mass Digitization (by Peter B. Kaufman and Jeff Ubois, D-Lib Magazine, November/December 2007, Volume 13 Number 11/12).

The bad news
The bad news, as James pointed out this morning, is that the GAO contract for digitizing is very bad indeed (GAO *did* sell exclusive access to legislative history to Thomson West). Quoting Carl Malamud, James notes that GAO gets access to the digitized data but does not get a copy of its own; the rest of the government doesn't even get access to the data. The public is left with the option of going to GAO headquarters and paying 20 cents per page to copy paper! As Carl says, "This is one of those deals where the public domain got sold off."

This morning there was more bad news. Kate at ArchivesNext reports that the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has a new report Record Chaos: The Deplorable State of Electronic Record Keeping in the Federal Government, that concludes "that the federal government is severely mismanaging its electronic records." CREW also says that a House Committee proposal to amend federal record keeping laws "is anemic and fails to make the substantial changes necessary to bring the federal government into the 21st century."

And even the good news is tempered by the fact that we have less than we could and are a long way from an even an adequate system of permanent preservation of digital information or a long-term solution to digitizing non-digital information. We will have to hope that the White House will deliver a snapshot of the White House web site and that the snapshot will be accurate and complete. The behavior of the White House with regard to electronic records and email does not make us optimistic. The NARA/TGN deal is better than the GAO/Thomson deal, but still leaves much to be desired and, as pointed out even by defenders of the deal, it is unlikely that we will ever have free, open, networked access to the digital information that TGN digitizes. That means the real effect of the deal is to privatize the information.

Comment
For me, the biggest disappointment in these latest developments is that librarians and archivists seem to be too willing to accept "good enough" and not willing enough to argue harder for "better." There are lots of people who have good reason to argue for less access, more fees, less privacy, and more control of information, but librarians and archivists should not be among them. I believe that we should not spend time making the case for the private sector; it is fully capable of making its own case. We should spend our time fighting for free, full, open, public access, usability of information, and long term preservation.

The primary mission of private sector companies is to make money, not to serve the public. They may serve the public as a by-product of making money, but no for-profit company will go to its owners and say "we are going to do the best thing for public access" without the qualification "that will make us money." Unfortunately "making money" often conflicts with public access. Politicians (and some bureaucrats) will argue for greater control of government information; some will argue for secrecy of government information on the one hand and privacy-invading policies on the other. Most government agencies do not have information access or long term preservation of their information as a primary mission and the exceptions are notable (e.g. LOC, NARA).

In contrast, the primary mission of many libraries and archives is to provide free public open access with long term preservation and usability. While others may have some of those pieces as secondary goals, few if any have them all. For many libraries and archives these goals are not just their primary mission but their defining characteristic.

While digitization and digital preservation are neither easy nor inexpensive, that doesn't mean that we have to pay any and all costs for them. The digital era should be making it possible to provide better access without giving up free use and reuse, without giving up open access, without turning over control to those whose primary mission is something other than free, open, public access and long term preservation. But increasingly we see a combination of politics and economics leaving us with contracts that trump copyright and fair use, with "access" being negotiated at almost any cost (including loss of control), with DRM technologies that prohibit easy (or any) reuse, and with privacy protections being deprecated or even ignored. Even in the case of the NARA/TGN contract that is legally "better" than the GAO/Thomson contract, we are left with the effect of two-tiers of access and network access being essentially privatized and fee-based.

I believe that librarians and archivists should be pushing the boundaries and insisting for more and better, not accepting some benefits by negotiating away the big benefits we could be getting in the digital age. This is particularly important for government information that is in the public domain. If we can't make this work for public information that is not copyrighted, how will we be able to do so for information that is?

I'm not arguing for a perfect, ideal world that is impractical to achieve. I am suggesting that we should fight for everything we can get. We should celebrate when we make inroads with a contract (like NARA/TGN) that is better than the others (like GAO/Thomson) but we should do so by committing to doing better next time. We should not accept this as "good enough" -- because it is not and we can do better next time. In fact, every time we accept a less-than-perfect deal as "good enough," we make it a little harder to make a better deal next time. We lower the bar if we accept "good enough" and stop trying to achieve better. We should not take the time to convince ourselves or the public that this is as good as we can get; we should take that time to admit to the limitations and trade offs and to commit to doing better next time.

There is lots written these days about "the future of libraries" and "the role of libraries in the digital age" and many people openly wonder if there is a place for libraries at all. I think there are several places where libraries have a unique role to play in society and the areas of digitization and digital access and preservation are important ones.

We need to make the case for the public; for free, open, public access; for long-term preservation and usability; for public accountability in the control of information; for reader privacy. Librarians and archivists have a unique role in doing that. In doing so, we will face an uphill battle and trade offs, but we should never lose sight of our unique role in society. We should never cheapen our professions by making the case for less (there are plenty of people to do that). We should always make the case for more. We will not always succeed and we will have to make trade offs. But we should always do so in the context of staking out a territory that is different from the private sector and those who are willing to get less. We should stand up for rights that others are not willing to fight for. We must fight for it when there are so many forces aligned against free, open access.

I'd like to see us emulate Carl Malamud and CREW and Brewster Kahle more and do less of making excuses for TGN and Thomson.

According to a post on .govwatch (The National Archives Is Quietly Destroying Millions of Documents April 08, 2008 by Coby Logen), a recent memo at the National Archives and Records Administration says:

After considering our other records management program priorities for FY 2008, availability of harvested web content at other "archiving" sites (e.g., www.archive.org), and the resources required for conducting and preserving a government-wide web snapshot, NARA has determined that we will not conduct a web harvest or snapshot at the end of the current Administration.

Logen says that "Not capturing federal web sites now may mean losing millions of web pages authored under the Bush administration when leadership changes in January 2009."

John Wonderlich at the Sunlight Foundations comments that "The fact that digital preservation is done by others outside NARA isn't an excuse for NARA to abdicate their responsibility, but an argument that they should be capable of fulfilling it." (Digital Preservation Under Threat? by John Wonderlich on April 9, 2008)

This seems yet another example of the government saying it cannot and therefore it won't. (The NARA/TGN contract as a bad precedent). Call it the Katrina of digital preservation?

The New York Times sums up the underlying issue nicely yesterday: "In Storing 1's and 0's, the Question Is $" (By John Schwartz, New York Times, April 9, 2008). It is not a technological issue; it is an issue of funding and policy and control. (See: The Technical is Political.)

A comment (Digitization Contract expands access to public records) posted here last week to a posting (Yet another digitization contract limits free access to public records) about the NARA/TGN contract to digitize certain materials at NARA, said that the contract "does not limit access to public records" and that "This is a definite win for the public."

I want to to take the opportunity to address the arguments made in that comment and enumerate some of the problems that I see with the contract and ones like it. In brief: (as James pointed out) while contracts like this one are attractive in the short run to some people because they do provide some access that we do not now have, in the long run they are bad ideas because our short term, limited gains result in long-term net losses to free public access to public information. Even people who relish the short term gains should be concerned about the long-term net losses.

The good things about the Contract
Let me begin by noting that there are many things about this contract that are good and that reflect, I think, the fact that government officials have learned from past mistakes. Examples of the good things in the contract are: the inclusion specific technical specifications, the right of NARA to interrupt processing when necessary to provide reference service and public access to the materials, the "non-exclusive" nature of the contract, the fact that TGN must provide free online access to the Digitized Materials in all NARA locations, the fact that NARA does not transfer permanent control or ownership of the materials to TGN, and the five year limitation on TGN's sole use of (some of) the digital copies.

The bad things about the Contract
But there are, I believe, several things wrong with the contract -- things that result in a net loss to the public rather than a net gain.

1. The "enhancements" provided by the contract are fee-based and therefore explicitly and implicitly limit use and impose two-tier access.
2. The contract promotes access over control. For the public to have "access" to public information content without the ability to use and reuse it "enhances" with one hand while it diminishes with the other. Enhancing access at the expense of control is a net loss for the public.
3. The so-called expansion of access obscures the limitations on free public access to public information that deals such as the NARA/TGN deal impose. For example,
   • NARA gives TGN "the rights to and the exclusive and unlimited right to use the Digitized Materials and all metadata created for the electronic databases for five years."
   • There is nothing in the contract that requires the information that TGN dispenses during the five years to be usable or reusble by the public and we must assume from the language of the contract that it certainly does not intend to grant such rights for use of public information to citizens.
   • The agreement gives TGN veto over disclosure of information about the agreement itself (section 4.4 of the Agreement).
   • The agreement creates a category of "confidential information" that is exempt from disclosure (Section 4.2). This includes "designs or styles, trade secrets, inventions," and even "know-how." This is an example of the government not only condoning "closed access" principles over "open access" principles, it is contractually requiring NARA to do so.
   • NARA is giving TGN the right to use NARA trademarks, which will obscure the difference between TGN and NARA itself thus blurring for the public the free-public access of government information with private-company-fee-access. The contract even requires NARA to link from its own Catalog (ARC) to the TGN site, thus effectively turning NARA into an advertiser and promoter of TGN. It is not clear to me that this requirement of NARA to link to TGN will end after five years.
4. It is not true, as the comment claims, that "The digitized copies of these records become freely accessible at all NARA reading rooms." Rather, the contract explicitly places limits on use of the digitized images for 5 years -- even in the reading rooms. These limitations include: "production for a fee of digital images" and, the permission to provide DVDs or CD-ROMs "for sale to the public." Even those distributions by NARA must include "license restrictions" that "will limit their use to prohibit resale, distribution or republication." (Section 1.4a [emphasis added])
5. The contract does not, as the comment claims, make "the digitized copies of these records freely available to everyone after five years at no cost to the taxpayer." Indeed the wording of the contract explicitly gives NARA the right after five years "to sell" the digital content. In addition, the contract does not remove restrictions on materials digitized from microform after 5 years. (See Section 1.4b)
6. The argument that any "enhancement" is good -- even if it imposes restrictions and two-tier access is often used by the private sector as a rationalization for privatization of government information. The battles over privatization of public information have a long history and, with the shift to digital information, we face new battles. I believe that the push for privatization -- particularly because of the costs involved in digitization -- means that we should be more cautious, not less cautious or cavalier, about promoting, facilitating, or encouraging contractual arrangements such as the NARA/TGN deal that grant special rights to the private sector or blur the difference between the private and public sectors.
7. Contracts such as this one set a precedent for creating two-tier or fee-only access to public information. When we allow the government to make excuses for failing to provide free public access by claiming that we have no choice and that this is better than nothing, we lower the bar for the next contract -- and the next.

It is a bigger problem than this one contract
We at FGI have no argument against the private sector repackaging and adding value to public information -- as long as the information itself is freely available to everyone to use and re-use. When everyone has access to the raw content, then we will all be able to repackage and add value to public information, we will all have free access and the ability to "enhance access."

But when any contractual agreement or system (private-sector or governmental) locks the raw information away from citizens or charges a fee for that information, then such systems and contracts, by definition, rest control of the information from the public and consolidate that control in a government agency or private sector company.

This problem of control exists not just with contracts such as the NARA/TGN contract. It also exists for information such as the Congressional Record and the Federal Register (which are "free" one-page-at-a-time, but cost thousands of dollars a year for a subscription; see http://bookstore.gpo.gov/collections/eproducts.jsp). It exists for Congressional Research Reports, which the government does not make available to the public except for those that leak out of government control or that private vendors provide for a fee (see http://opencrs.com/ and Inexplicable anomaly By Leslie Harris and Matt Stoller).

I am sure that some will argue that it is still possible (because of the non-exclusive nature of the contract) for the government or someone else to re-digitize these materials and make them freely available in the future. But that argument is the opposite of the argument for negotiating this contract in the first place. If we have to have a contract like this now, if this is the best we can do, if the government cannot afford to digitize these materials today, why should we assume that this will change in the future if those materials are already digitized? The practical result of contracts like this is that they will make it harder, not easier for these materials to ever become freely available to the public.

In summary, this is a big problem, not just a problem of this one contract. We are grasping short-term, good-enough expediency at the expense of long-term free public access. As citizens and librarians, we should not lower our standards for free public access to public information by accepting less than full, free, public access.

If you wish to pay your respects but cannot travel to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in D.C., can now do so from your computer. NARA and Footnote.com have released a searchable digital replica of the Memorial Wall.

The site also allows you to "leave a tribute, a story or photograph about any of the 58,256 veterans killed or missing in the Vietnam War".

Word of warning, the site claims that due to recent high traffic, you might experience slow loading pages or images. They are working to improve this.

In the spirit of Sunshine Week, the National Archives announced the opening of 1.3 million pages of Cold War era Central Intelligence Agency records, dating from 1947 to 1977. The documents are being released as “a part of the National Declassification Initiative program announced by the Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein in April 2006.”

I'm not sure how many of these are available as digital copies, but nevertheless, these records may help some of my student patrons with their papers on the "Red Scare" and the Cold War (every semester I have at least five students working on some aspect of this topic!).

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) announced the online availability of over 5.2 million records of passengers who arrived at the ports of Baltimore, Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia in the 19th century. These records were transcribed from original ship manifests into databases by Temple University's Center for Immigration Research and donated to NARA.

Intrigued, I went to NARA's Access to Archival Databases (AAD) and searched "Records for Passengers Who Arrived at the Port of New York During the Irish Famine" between 1846-1851 (over 607,800 records!), and I found several of my Troy clan ancestors that arrived in 1851. I'll have to compare the names with the extensive family tree that my grandfather made. If he was alive today, he'd be searching this database for hours!

Other record sets include: Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Germans to the United States, 1850-1897; Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Italians to the United States, 1855-1900; and Data Files Relating to the Immigration of Russians to the United States, 1834-1897.

Did White House Lie About Loss of Five Million Emails?, by Damon Poeter CMP Channel (03 October 2007).

When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that went missing, a White House lawyer pointed the finger at an outside IT contractor. The only problem? No such IT contractor exists, according to sources close to the investigation of a possible violation of the Federal Records and Presidential Records acts.

The article includes a "Timeline of Events in White House E-mail Scandal."

Conservative Group Targets Hillary Clinton's Papers in Presidential Library Library Journal Academic Newswire (August 28, 2007)

The Clinton records request highlights two significant government documents issues now pending before Congress: FOIA backlogs, and a controversial Bush executive order regarding access to presidential documents.