GAO was asked to summarize NARA’s progress in developing the ERA system and the ongoing risks the agency faces in completing it. In preparing this testimony, GAO relied on its prior work and conducted a preliminary review of NARA’s fiscal year 2010 ERA expenditure plan.

Highlights (PDF; 45 KB)

. . . Digital literature, online scientific research and internet journalism that should have been saved in the nation’s main libraries over the past five years may have been lost because ministers have failed to give them the legal power to copy and archive websites, the Guardian has learned.

Senior executives at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland (NLS) are dismayed that legislation giving them the right to collect online and digital material is still not in force, more than six years after it was passed by parliament.

The omission has meant the libraries – which are legally required to archive books, newspapers and journals – have failed to record online coverage of major events such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the MPs’ expenses scandal.

The National Archives and Records Administration announced this week that the agency has nearly completed the process of loading the electronic records of President George W. Bush into the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system. To date, more than 85% of the total volume has been ingested.

The State of Kentucky has developed a best-practices manual for publishing — and depositing — government documents digitally.

Kentucky State Government Publications Handbook, Kentucky Department for Libraries & Archives. Frankfort, KY (June 2008) Edition 1.0

The Executive Office of the President (EOP) plans to hire a company to help archive the ever-expanding amount of data that qualifies as presidential records that the office publishes on publicly accessible Web sites and social networking sites, according to a recently published solicitation notice.

The EOP wants a contractor to capture and store content posted on the sites that the administration is required to maintain under the Presidential Records Act (PRA), the notice said. According to the request for quote (RFQ) notice, the contractor will also be responsible for transferring the captured data to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for historical preservation.

I had known that the Internet Archive had submitted a response to the GPO’s RFP for mass digitization. A friend just sent me the link to the proposal submitted to GPO (embedded below and here’s the link to the proposal and supporting documents).

Curators and public policy experts representing commercial, academic and non-profit organizations convened for a two-day meeting at the Library of Congress to explore strategies for preserving public policy content that has been made available only on the web. 

Usually, historians are hard-pressed to find any original source material about those who have shaped our civilization. In the Internet era, scholars of science might have too much. Never have so many people generated so much digital data or been able to lose so much of it so quickly, experts at the San Diego Supercomputer Center say. Computer users world-wide generate enough digital data every 15 minutes to fill the U.S. Library of Congress.

On behalf of the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, Brian Jean, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities and Member of Parliament (Fort McMurray-Athabasca), today announced funding for Athabasca University’s “Connecting Canadians: Canada’s Multicultural Newspapers” project.

This project will digitize and deploy to the Web up to 20 multicultural newspapers on an open-access basis.

The Digital Continuity Action Plan is a world first initiative which will prevent important public records being lost and ensure today’s information is available tomorrow. Today most public information is created digitally, but the continuity of that digital information over time has become a real concern. To address this concern the plan has been developed as an all of public sector programme to assist and support agencies overcome issues with storing, accessing, using and reusing the digital information they produce.

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