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History will vanish into the ether

By Toss Gascoigne - posted Monday, 16 May 2005


One librarian had asked her colleagues to nominate reports they could not find. She then set out on a determined hunt to see if they were really missing. She found them, but concluded that:

All of the publications were still available somewhere, but that was often due to good luck, and not the good management of the government agencies that created them. Five of the seven titles had disappeared from the website of the creating agency, with no redirects or other assistance given to the would-be reader about how to find the new location.

The crucial point for her was that, while they remained available somehow, somewhere, their discoverability was almost impossible. All of the titles in this small study were reported missing by librarians, all sophisticated users of the Internet.

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My impression from this small study is that to this point, we have not yet suffered a serious loss of government information. I have not yet been able to identify any significant government publication that has disappeared altogether. However, there are certainly significant government publications that have disappeared from the creating agency's websites. Government information is definitely dispersed, some of it is very hard to find, and the fact that some of it remains at all is thanks to the whim of the Internet archive harvesting robot, rather than to any policy, strategy or plan of commonwealth agencies.

Why was this material moved from the websites? Sometimes it was because IT managers wanted to keep the websites manageable and streamlined, and moved old material off as pressures mounted. Old bookmarks become useless when websites are redesigned. And significant documents are sometimes not seen as significant at the time. It's only in hindsight that we realise they have important historical value.

The loss of old material seems to occur most often where a website has gone through an upgrade, change of staff or change of management, or when a significant project and its attendant publications have come to an end.

Usually older publications are relocated as the structure or focus of the website changes, to make way for new versions or new publications - they are finally removed when they no longer attract much traffic or seem out of place.

One person said that he never expects to find reports more than a couple of years old on a government website: "I presume that a range of issues are involved, including changes of government, changes of bureaucrats at the top and a desire to take a different policy direction from the one mentioned in the report."

All these issues were compounded by the march of technology: new software means old reports can become hard to read even if they are available.

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Respondents were united in their call for the development of a protocol, funded and implemented across government. Some thought the answer lay in an expansion of the PANDORA archival system run by the National Library of Australia.

One correspondent from New Zealand pointed to new legislation passed there earlier this month. Perhaps the answer to the issue in Australia lies in the adoption of legislation with a similar intent to New Zealand's Public Records Bill:

The bill establishes a framework under which public records can be managed; ensures that the record keeping requirements of the Bill extend to as broad a range of government activities as practicable; and provides for the preservation and accessibility of public archives. In order to achieve these objectives, it provides a legal framework under which public records are created, stored, preserved, disposed of and made accessible.

The growth in email and the Internet has created a new set of challenges, which the bill addresses by requiring agencies to create and maintain records and to make them available over time. Agencies will also need to seek the approval of the chief archivist before they destroy records.

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This an edited version of an address to the seminar "Digital Amnesia: The Challenges of Government Online" organised by the Australian Library and Information Association at the National Library of Australia on April 21, 2005. First published in The Australian on May 11, 2005.



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About the Author

Toss Gascoigne is executive director of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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