A crisis for Web preservation
Posted in Government Info on June 21st, 2004A crisis for Web preservation.
By Florence Olsen. Federal Computer Week. June 21, 2004.
The article mentions several different problems including fugitive or
unknown information, known information that disappears from the web,
possibility of using web harvesters to “capture publications,”
information that is largely invisible to harvesters (the “deep web”),
GPO’s own electronic archive, and GPO’s “special arrangements” with
other institutions.
Superintendent of Documents Judith Russell, Daniel Greenstein (head of
the California Digital Library), and Jeff Young (of OCLC) are quoted.
No one mentions the possibility of actually depositing digital
information in the the FDLP, but Greenstein is quoted as saying that
the depository library program “is broken…. We have to solve the
problem because GPO isn’t.”
I wonder if he is right? Is our only option to “solve the problem”
ourselves? How many libraries are equipped or funded to to that? Or is
there still a chance that GPO might see that it has 1300 federally-mandated, long-term, well-established partners that are increasingly
capable of accepting digital deposits?