from the
Washington Post:
Capturing The Bush Legacy Online
Effort to Preserve Records Underway
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 20, 2008;
Page A13
...A consortium of government and nonprofit agencies plans to capture
snapshots of every federal government Web site before Jan. 20, when the
next president moves into the
White House
and starts remaking the federal bureaucracy to fit his agenda. The goal
of the 2008 "end-of-term harvest" is to preserve millions of agency
records in an online archive that librarians hope will provide a
valuable trove for historians, government scholars and the public...
...The San Francisco-based Internet Archive will use powerful computer
software to automatically capture and store material from federal Web
sites. Other partners include the California Digital Library and the
University of North Texas
Libraries, which will focus on in-depth looks at specific agencies; and
the Government Printing Office, which maintains paper records in the
Federal Depository Library Program and will offer curating advice.
...The Archives does not plan to capture again all agency Web sites,
Cooper said, noting that the Archives will work with agencies to
determine which Web records should be preserved.
I'm glad this is happening, but, again, this is something that should be done through a publicly accountable institution with an official mandate to preserve historical public documents, be they digital or on paper.