Obama Seeks Input on Classification of Records

Starting Monday, citizens will be able to engage in a conversation about the classification of government records. A blog will be used to gather input for 3 days (June 29-July 1), and a discussion forum will run through July 13. Three questions that will be included are: How should the government determine what records should be classified? How can the government improve access to digital records once they are declassified? How can technology be used to improve the declassification process? One caution in the words of Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, "Just because somebody has a good idea doesn't mean the government is going to accept it. I would not confuse the process with the outcome." Hmmm.... Read more.

Visit the Transparency and Open Government site to access the blog and to keep up to date on Open Government Innovations. Note the link at the right of the page that allows you to "Collaborate on crafting constructive proposals to address challenges from the Discussion phase".

This initiative underscores the administration's commitment to involve citizens in a dialogue - and to use Web 2.0 tools to make that happen.

Digital Preservation Pioneer: Jerry Handfield

Jerry Handfiled has taken a fascinating journey from high school, when he created a virtual "move" of an 1830s-era family across country to today in his position as Washington State Archivist. In 2007, the Library of Congress provided funding for the Washington State Digital Archives to lead a multi-state preservation consortium to provide preservation and access services for valuable government information in digital form. Today 8 additional states have become involved, and several others are expected to join the project. One quote of Handfield's is of especial interest to Archivists pondering Web 2.0, "the cloud is where we're headed." Read more.

Did you know that a student currently pursuing a Master's degree in Archives and Records Administration (MARA) through San Jose State University's School of Library and Information Science holds a position as a public records archivist at the Washington State Archives? To read more about Deborah and how she believes enrollment in the MARA degree program helped her attain this position, visit the "Meet ...Deborah" page on the SLIS website.

Russia's Archives suffer from the "Unconstitutional prohibition on access to information"

Have you wondered what happened to the archives of the former Communist Party in Russia? Russian law on state secrets requires a 30-year period of secrecy for most documents and 50 years for documents of intelligence services relating to the Soviet nuclear program. That means documents created before 1979 should be available to the public. But according to Nikita Petrov, a Russian historian and activist at Memorial, a Russian organization dedicated to Soviet political repression, the Russian State Archives has not released many of those documents. Ironically, as we've learned about records, there can and usually is more than one copy. When the Soviet Union broke up, Ukrainian and Baltic officials declassified copies of KGB documents left behind. Several of those reports have made it to the World Wide Web. Read more.

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter

The June 2009 Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter is now
available. Note the first article - Tradition Meets Web 2.0 - The Library's Flickr Project.

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/news/newsletter/200906.pdf

Other articles in this issue:

* Archiving 2009 Conference
* Library Trends Issue Dedicated to NDIIPP Projects
* Recent Meetings, Announcements and more!

Twitter playing a large part in protests in Iran

Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter have become important tools for activists in Iran. But after Facebook was blocked activists increasingly turned to Twitter to get the news out to the rest of the world. Will researchers of the future be able to read the actual tweets? Read more.

President Obama & 3D Record of Presidency - Now this is funny!

Can you imagine a $2.5 billion advanced digital-imaging project that would allow the National Archives to document every moment of the new president's life? Well, someone did! According to this scenario, President Obama will spend the next four years in a custom-made, lycra-and-neoprene bodysuit, featuring 238 reflective "marker balls to instantly relay trillions of bytes of information to a central computer in Colorado. Read more at one of the Web's most reliable sources of fake news.

Rare Lincoln Emancipation Document housed in the Hawaii State Archives

A few posts back, I mentioned Presidential Libraries. What you may know is that the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, is the home of The Papers of Abraham Lincoln project. What you may not know is that the Hawaii State Archives possesses four Lincoln documents. One, the letter of condolences from Lincoln to Kamehameha V on the death of his brother Kamehameha IV is the most prized document, since it contains a personal message from an American President to the Monarch of Hawaii. The document that was considered the least significant was confirmed by Dr. Daniel W. Stowell, Director of The Papers of Abraham Lincoln project, as the authorization signed by Lincoln directing the Secretary of State to affix the Seal of the United States to his Proclamation. Although the document does not state which Proclamation, since it was dated "22nd September, 1862," researchers are confident it refers to the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of 1862. Interestingly, Hawaii was an independent kingdom in the 1860s, and it's 1852 constitution had prohibited slavery in the islands. No one knows how the document came into the possession of the Hawaii State Archives, but those at the Hawaii State Archives are very pleased it did. Read more about the Hawaii State Archives and the Lincoln Documents in their possession. Read more about The Papers of Abraham Lincoln project. How does this relate to Web 2.0? We'll it has me wondering exactly what documents our current President will leave behind for archivists of the 22nd Century and in what format.

Pratt Photo Collection Goes Digital

I don't know how I missed this one! The Pratt Institute Libraries recently launched their Flickr digital image collection. The over 1,600 images from their Archives and Special Collections date mainly from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries and document the history of Pratt and the surrounding area. Even if you're not an archivist, you might be interested in the Ex Libris Collection which includes bookplates from private and institutional libraries, which provide examples of book art and typography from a number of prominent bookplate artists. Read more. [No - the image is not from the collection. It is a free bookplate design made available at Scribd]

International Internet Preservation Consortium publishes WARC file format

In 1996, Mike Burner and Brewster Kahle explained the format used by the Internet Archive for aggregating files collected when archiving Websites. By convention, archive files were named with an ".arc" extension. The file format was designed to be self contained, extensible, streamable, and viable. Read more.

Recently, the International Internet Preservation Consortium announced the publication of the WARC file format, an extension to the ARC format, as an international standard: ISO 28500:2009, Information and documentation -- WARC file format.

The WARC format will standardize the way billions of resources collected from the web are structured, managed, and stored. New possibilities offered by the WARC format include recording of arbitrary metadata, management of duplicates and of migrated records, segmentation of records, and allocation of an identifier for every contained file. Read more about the International Internet Preservation Consortium.

Presidential Libraries: George W. Bush

Presidential Libraries are administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), but money is raised for the libraries the old fashioned way: fundraising. You may have read that the 43rd president was able to raise more than $100 million, most in the first 100 days after he left office. Read more.

Although the George W. Bush presidential library is not slated to open until 2013, the National Archives nears the halfway point in reviewing the plans for the library and policy center being constructed in Dallas. Read more.

If you're interested in working at this or any of the other 12 libraries in the Presidential Libraries System, you'll be glad to know that employment, internship, and volunteer opportunities are available. Visit the George W. Bush library page, scroll to the bottom, and follow the links to learn more about these opportunities.