BackTalk: Beware the E-vanishing Act

Agencies have freely deleted outdated items because it simply didn't occur to them that things like press releases and superseded statistical data had historical value. Sometimes rapid technological change makes documents effectively unusable.

Publishers of electronic journals and article databases also remove content owing to copyright issues or if the information is considered defamatory or plagiarized. They may also have political reasons—articles that recently disappeared without notice included an MSNBC story, "White House: Bush Misstated Report on Iraq," and Time magazine's 1998 article by the first President Bush, "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam."

Before librarians realized what was happening, the web had inadvertently shifted the burden of preserving content from librarians to document creators, who are not in the habit of thinking about the historical record.

Fortunately, some librarians notice deletions and complain. Loudly. Librarians have voiced concerns about the threat to permanent public access to Congress and the Government Printing Office (GPO) over the past ten years. As a result, the Superintendent of Documents and the National Archives and Records Administration have taken responsibility for preserving government information; federal agencies must assess everything on their web sites, consider how to preserve and update it, and use Government Information Locator Service (GILS) standards to make the information easier to retrieve.

That is still not a perfect system. Too many people who won't necessarily understand or abide by rules can create and delete documents, and the government tends toward secrecy and self-protection. The Bush administration still won't release 28 pages from the report on Congress's Joint Inquiry into 9/11, which are said to be embarrassing to our Saudi allies. However, the government's commitment is a big improvement since the terrorist attacks made its agencies aware they had no idea what was on their web sites, let alone what they had deleted in the subsequent panic.

The American Library Association's (ALA) Washington Office, Federal Depository Library Program Council, and ALA's Government Documents Round Table Task Force on Permanent Public Access to Government Information continue to monitor the problems presented by the delete key. They keep us informed and present our concerns to both Congress and the GPO. Still, the way to make sure information is preserved remains for librarians to do it themselves.

At the University of North Texas, librarians work with the GPO to operate a "CyberCemetery" (govinfo.library.unt.edu) of documents of defunct government agencies. GPO is now sending the archive more than 2.3 gigabytes of data from agencies that were folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Librarians at the University of Maryland's Thurgood Marshall Law Library (www.law.umaryland.edu/edocs/usccr/html%20files/usccrhp.asp) are digitizing older documents of the Civil Rights Commission and archiving its current electronic documents. Any library with a mission that requires access to specific agencies' electronic files should take heed.

The Library of Congress uses a digital harvesting tool developed by OCLC to identify and archive significant web content. And, the Illinois State Library is developing a harvesting tool to capture the state government's digital publications and plans to make it available to other states.

Organizations like the Digital Library Federation and the Council on Library and Information Resources have created preservation standards; one component is the ability to migrate content to new formats. Lots of eyes will also keep stuff from disappearing without anyone noticing. Fortunately, other organizations also monitor government information, e.g., OMBWatch (ombwatch.org) and the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy (www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy), and the web site called The Memory Hole (www.thememoryhole.org/index.htm).

However, librarians are better off assuming that all digital information is temporary. Just as we've worked cooperatively to make sure last copies of printed works are preserved, we must act cooperatively to maintain digital information we've paid for, with subscriptions or taxes. Providing permanent access to public information has always been the job of librarians, and we are the ones who have to meet this challenge.