And yet another role for the information professional.

From the Article:

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.

[Snip]

White House officials want the company to crawl and archive PRA content on third-party Web sites where the EOP maintains a presence, such as the White House’s Facebook page and Twitter feed, the notice said. According to the RFQ, the EOP wants data capture to be automatic rather than how it’s currently done.

White House officials want the company to crawl and archive PRA content on third-party Web sites where the EOP maintains a presence, such as the White House’s Facebook page and Twitter feed, the notice said. According to the RFQ, the EOP wants data capture to be automatic rather than how it’s currently done.

EOP officials want to capture the posted content at least twice a day, the notice said. In addition, they said the vendor will have to make the data organized and searchable and provide a Web-based tool that government employees can use to manage the record-keeping.

The data will also need to be stored in a way that will let NARA ingest the records into the agency’s next-generation Electronic Records Archives system.

Access the Complete Solicitation (PDF)

Source: FCW

From the Article:

In a vault beneath the British Library here, Jeremy Leighton John grapples with a formidable challenge in digital life. Dr. John, the library’s first curator of eManuscripts, is working on ways to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today’s discoveries and better understand the people who made them.

His task is only getting harder. Scientists who collaborate via email, Google, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them. Computer-intensive experiments and the software used to analyze their output generate millions of gigabytes of data that are stored or retrieved by electronic systems that quickly become obsolete.

Source: Wall Street Journal
Hat Tip: ACM Tech News

From a Blog Post:

Yahoo! announced that it will close the site on October 26, 2009, steering users towards their paid service instead. We have been archiving GeoCities sites for years in our crawls, but, as goes with the territory of being web archivists, we want to make sure to gather as many of the sites as possible before the looming end of an era, 10-26-2009. If you have a page with GeoCities or are a fan of a particular page, please use our special collections page to ensure its preservation. Additionally, please refer to the Archive Team’s efforts to save cultural information that may be lost with the site closing. Yahoo! is also offering valuable advice at their help center.

Source: Internet Archive

From the Article:

A rich but dusty archive of South Carolina history — newspapers published throughout the state from 1860 to 1922 — will become Web accessible through the S.C. Digital Newspaper Project, an initiative of University Libraries.

The project, funded with a two-year $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), will scan, enhance, and deliver to the Library of Congress an estimated 100,000 pages of selected S.C. newspaper titles. The resulting online archive will reflect major artistic, literary, religious, ethnic, cultural, economic, and political events in South Carolina and surrounding states.

Source: University of South Carolina

Yesterday, we posted: Digital Preservation: LOCKSS Chief Scientist David Rosenthal Speaks at Library of Congress. The post contained links to slides and several related documents but not the video of Rosenthal’s presentation.

Today, the video was made available on the LC web site. You can view it here. The video runs 76 minutes.

Source: Library of Congress

From the Summary

When David Rosenthal talks, people listen. They may not always agree with the Chief Scientist of the LOCKSS program based at Stanford University, but they engage with what he has to say.

This was the case on July 27, 2009, when a large crowd gathered at the Library of Congress to hear Rosenthal’s presentation How Are We Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents? (pdf, 321 Kb). Rosenthal’s talk was a reprise of his widely-discussed plenary at the Spring 2009 Coalition for Networked Information Task Force meeting. In his introduction at the CNI meeting, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch told the audience that Rosenthal’s work had changed his thinking about digital preservation.

+ Rosenthal’s presentation at the Library was filmed and will soon be available as a webcast. Update: The video (76 minutes) is now available.

+ Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents? (2009): Presentation Slides (PDF):

Source: NDIIPP, Library of Congress

From the Article:

Following a successful pilot program during the spring of 2008, the Library of Congress, Internet Archive and California Digital Library initiated a web archiving program that explored archiving websites from the perspective of students in elementary, middle and high schools. Two Library activities supported the pilot: the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and the Teaching with Primary Sources program.

The K-12 Web Archiving Program gives students the opportunity to think about history by selecting sources for ongoing research use. Teens and younger students select and capture web content using Internet Archive’s Archive-It service, creating “time capsules” of what is important to them to represent their current lives.

During the 2008-09 school year, students from ten different schools in nine states participated in the program. Over 1,700 websites and 233 million URLs, or objects, were collected during the year, totaling 11.7 terabytes of data. The Internet Archive noted that 96 percent of the websites selected by students have not been archived by any other Archive-It partner, and 24 percent of the websites are not in the Internet Archive’s general archive. Examples include websites for the Iowa Farm Bureau, Women’s Adventures in Science, and How to Make a Sock Monkey. In total, 68 web collections were created – including a Prom Guide and Historical Black College Search collection – and immediately accessible on the Archive-It website.

Students and teachers alike found the program eye-opening. Student comments included “choosing the websites was really fun because it let everyone be creative and really think about what teenagers enjoy today,” and “I had never thought of archiving websites, even though in this day and age we use them as much as and more than books.” Teacher Emily Patterson of George Washington High School in Charleston, West Virginia said, “I think it was certainly an enriching experience. I like that it allowed them to see and examine their lives and Internet content as history in the making.”

Source: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program / Library of Congress