The "Big Scrape": This Time, You're on Your Own
From Federal News Radio:
The "big scrape" of government web sites won't be happening this year. And watchers of government records collection are not happy.The National Archives announced that they will not conduct an "open harvest" of federal agency web sites, as they did in 2000 and 2004. Each of those years, NARA "scraped" agency sites to record what those sites looked like and what information they contained at the end of a presidential term (the second Clinton and first Bush 43 terms). Now NARA is saying that they won't do such a chore in 2008.
NARA says they did the harvests with reluctance in 2000 and 2004, "because we had not yet issued records management guidance to federal agencies on managing their web records in accordance with the Federal Records Act." NARA says the January 2005 release of "Guidance on Managing Web Records" changed that. That document "addresses agencies' responsibilities for identifying, managing and scheduling web materials they identify as Federal records."