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National Archives Cuts Back On Web Site Archiving

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i-remember-everything dept.

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."

10 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Its not History by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you dont document it.

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    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  2. interesting in consideration..... by 3seas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ... the price of storage dropping as it has.

    So what is the real reason for this? Its certainly not cost.

    Is it possible that nobody is interested in the data?

    1. Re:interesting in consideration..... by bumburumbi · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Is it possible that nobody is interested in the data? People may not be interested in the data now, but as time passes, it will become more and more important. I am a bit surprised that the National Archives and the Library of Congress collect so little of the American cultural heritage. In Iceland, where I live, the National Library collects everything on the national TLD (is) three times a year, important sites are crawled more frequently. I know that the US web is several orders of magnitude larger than the Icelandic web. One would however assume that the resources available to the NARA and LC are significantly larger than what the Icelandic National Library has to spend on collecting websites. Collecting a subset of the US web every four years should be well within the means of the US government.
    2. Re:interesting in consideration..... by Kwirl · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think we all know that the less history remembers of George W Bush's term as president of the free world, the better off we will look in our children's eyes. If he gets lucky he might get off easy with a 'worst president to ever hold the office' footnote.

    3. Re:interesting in consideration..... by Foobar+of+Borg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If he gets lucky he might get off easy with a 'worst president to ever hold the office' footnote.
      Of course, like with Nixon, you will still have slavering beasties defending him for the next few decades and blaming everything on liberals and campus radicals.
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      Similar to the upcoming US election results
  3. Wrong Time to Quit by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The NARA should not be considering quitting right when the Bush regime is caught red-handed deleting vast amounts of incriminating digital content that it was legally required to archive.

    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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    make install -not war

    1. Re:Wrong Time to Quit by the+pickle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The NARA should not be considering quitting right when the Bush regime is caught red-handed deleting vast amounts of incriminating digital content that it was legally required to archive.

      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.

      p

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      In Korea, long hair is for old people!
  4. These archives are useless.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Any archives done by the government are useless because those who control the government can modify them if they so desire. This data needs to be archived by multiple independent private parties.

  5. The national archives exists for exactly this. by DragonTHC · · Score: 4, Informative

    their job is to archive public records. Every document produced by the US government is public record unless classified.

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    They're using their grammar skills there.
  6. doublespeak by osssmkatz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Back when archives.org was archiving whitehouse.gov, we saw changes in speeches to match the current rationales etc. Is this why they don't want to archive?

    --Sam