Part-Time Policy Wonk

From Inside Higher Ed:
As digital archives have become more important and more popular, there are varying schools of thought among scholars about how best to guarantee that they will be around for good. Some think that the best possibility is for the creators of the archives — people generally with some passion for the topic [...]

From the Council on Library and Information Resources:
T
his report addresses the question of what libraries and archives are legally empowered to do to preserve and make accessible for research their holdings of unpublished pre-1972 sound recordings. The report’s author, June M. Besek, is executive director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts [...]

From the Washington Post:
President Obama today announced that Vivek Kundra, chief technology officer for the District, will be the federal chief information officer.
It’s a job that did not exist in previous administrations; Obama, who leveraged social networks, text messages and other Internet tools on the campaign trail, promised to create a technology czar with the [...]

From the Associated Press:
In his first two years in office, Iowa Gov. Chet Culver rarely used his state e-mail account, relying instead on a private server and computer in what freedom-of-information advocates decried as an effort to skirt public records laws.
But after The Associated Press began questioning Culver aides about the matter, the governor changed [...]

From Information Today:
The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) hit the on switch in early February and brought up its new digital system, FDsys, (http://fdsys.gpo.gov) for access to government information. The system will replace GPO Access (www.gpoaccess.gov). The new system is an information management system that enables GPO to gather, process, preserve, archive, and make U.S. [...]

From the IT Examiner:
The older generation and their technologies are dying off. History is being lost, one senior and one computer at a time. Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (KEEP) is a project aimed at creating software that can recognise, recover, play, and safeguard all types of computer files from the 1970s forward. Articles written in [...]

From the Associated Press:
Barack Obama is the first wired president, ready to exchange e-mail with close friends and advisers. When do the rest of us get to read them?
We may have to wait until as late as 2028, depending on when Obama leaves office as president. That’s according to leading presidential historians who make their [...]

From Information Week:
It’s still early in the adoption cycle, but we’re beginning to see how U.S. federal agencies and other government users might employ cloud computing. Among the scenarios: cloud-bursting at sea by battleship groups, satellite imagery, and open source software development.

From the New York Times:
When the world entered the digital age, a great majority of human historical records did not immediately make the trip.
Literature, film, scientific journals, newspapers, court records, corporate documents and other material, accumulated over centuries, needed to be adapted for computer databases. Once there, it had to be arranged — along with [...]