National Archives Cuts Back On Web Site Archiving 45
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."
The national archives exists for exactly this. (Score:5, Informative)
Other Significant National Archive Redactions (Score:1, Informative)
Right after the 9/11 incident, these records were reclassified. Around the same time, there was a wholesale reclassification of documents in the National Archives going back to WWII, making them unavailable to the public.
Problem is bigger than Natl. Archives. (Score:2, Informative)
Private archiving, (e.g. archive.org) coverage is not what it once was either, though maybe for different reasons.
More and more operators are choosing to protect their "intellectual property" using robots exclude, noarchive, or similar policies.
More and more websites use dynamic methods to present data, or use more complex interfaces involving javascript, flash, java, etc that make them technically hard to capture.
Conversations that formerly occurred on usenet now happen on proprietary bulletin board systems that are technically difficult to crawl. Furthermore, most BBS TOS forbid automated crawling.
It is interesting that as more and more content is backed by databases, it is getting harder and harder to access and search for the desired content.