Gone Today, Here Tomorrow:
Archiving and Preserving Born Digital
Government Documents
James R. Jacobs [jrjacobs@stanford.edu]
International Documents Librarian
freegovinfo.info
Depository Library Council
Washington, D.C.
October, 20, 2008

agenda
• Archive-it administrative interface and workflow
• philosophy of digital collections
• Future plans

mood survey
• how many of you have:
• run across a site or a PDF that you wanted to
add to your collection?
• ever sent in a fugitive document to the GPO?
• have created subject guides/pathfinders to
govt information sites?
• want to have a digital repository?

SULAIR archive home:
http://www.archive-it.org/home/SSRG

CRS Report collection seeds

manage collections

search and discover
http://snipurl.com/crs-energyefficiency

Paste this into your HTML:
<form action=\"http://www.archive-it.org/public/search\">
<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"collection\"
value=\"***COLLECTIONID***\" />
<input type=\"text\" name=\"query\" />
<input type=\"submit\" name=\"go\" value=\"Go\" />
</form>
***COLLECTIONID*** = 1078 (CRS reports collection)
add search to other pages
</gratuitous_code>

why?

digital strategy
• archive-it (subject/agency focus. i.e., CRS Reports, FOIA, bay
area govts, Iranian blogs)
• LOCKSS: LPN to host/preserve GPOAccess crawl 1991-2007
(@200gb). GAO legislative histories; early planning for a
LOCKSS network of CA state agencies.
• Monthly file of urls to add to bib records and urls of digital docs
to catalog.
• IADeposit: delicious project to tag and upload federal docs to
the internet Archive's government documents collection.
• printing/binding/cataloging digital documents

what’s next?
• analysis of current collections, focusing crawls, expanding and
building new collections (Intl treaties and standards, working
papers, etc)
• more libraries involved in digital collections
• Farmington Plan Redux (collaborative collections)
• better access (create metadata, ingest into OPACs, google site
maps...)
• better/open-source digital management tools
• open metadata standards and repositories