There is an excellent post relevant to government information over at ArchivesNext. I recommend this highly.

• NARA and the web harvest: a discussion of the issues, ArchivesNext, April 14, 2008.

Kate does an excellent job, in my opinion, of analyzing the NARA decision to not do another web harvest of agency web sites at the end of the current administration. For example, she says, "For archivists, these web harvests should be troubling because they dispense with the process of appraisal. In effect, anything on the top four levels of an agency’s web site was determined to be of permanent value." Kate also includes links to articles about the issue and the NARA response.

It has excellent and informative comments that include, but go beyond, the specific issue of NARA and web harvesting. I found these comments particularly useful because they are mostly from the perspective of archivists and give insight into long-term preservation issues. Some of those making comments are well known in archival circles and speak from experience and with authority. Christine says that "it is very difficult to do item-level appraisal of web files, because the pages are usually so interconnected."

Of the original blog posting at .govwatch that started off the controversy and its claim that NARA is "Quietly Destroying Millions of Documents," Thomas E. Brown says "Nothing could be father the truth" and backs up what he says with facts.

Maarja discusses information gaps created when dynamic records are overwritten and not preserved. I found this comment by Maarja particularly interesting:

Depending on the agency, decisions on how best to share information might have been driven initially by technological factors more so than long term capture of knowledge. From reading records managers’ forums, I gather that in some agencies IT more so than RM may have driven adoption of solutions for dealing with electronic records.

No two organizations are going to have exactly the same culture and organizational climate. So it’s hard to predict how preservation of electronic information is going to play out throughout the government.

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.

Web Archiving, Masanès, Julien (Ed.) 2006, VII, 234 p., 28 illus., Hardcover

Julien Masanès, Director of the European Archive, has assembled contributions from computer scientists and librarians that altogether encompass the complete range of tools, tasks and processes needed to successfully preserve the cultural heritage of the Web. This book serves as a standard introduction for everyone involved in keeping alive the immense amount of online information, and it covers issues related to building, using and preserving Web archives both from the computer scientist and librarian viewpoints.

Practitioners will find in this book a state-of-the-art overview of methods, tools and standards they need for their activities. Researchers as well as advanced students in computer science will use it as an introduction to this new field with a hopefully stimulating review of open issues where future work is needed.

Some of the chapters:

• Selection for Web Archives
• Copying Websites
• Archiving the Hidden Web
• Access and Finding Aids
• Mining Web Collections
• The Long-Term Preservation of Web Content
• Small Scale Academic Web Archiving

I was listening to KPFA, my local pacifica station this morning, and they were having a fund drive for the Pacifica Radio Archives. The archives contain the voices of 20th century history: Studs Terkel, Mahalia Jackson, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Alice Walker, Martin Luther King, jr., Rosa Parks, bell hooks, and *many* more voices of peace and justice! The fund drive is needed to support their preservation project (and other projects) which seeks to digitize many of the old tapes in the archive in order to make them more accessible and longer-living. Or think about a donation in someone else's name for the holidays -- really, how many ties does your dad really need?!

Please, please, PLEASE donate to the pacifica archives if you can!

[Please note: I am not on the Pacifica board and FGI has no affiliation whatsoever with Pacifica. I just think that librarians and those interested in preserving history should support valuable preservation projects like this one.]