Difficulties in Electronic Publication Archival Processing for State Governments

Jackson, Larry S.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/16401 Copy

Description

Title

Difficulties in Electronic Publication Archival Processing for State Governments

Author(s)

Jackson, Larry S.

Issue Date

2005

Keyword(s)

• Web archives
• government documents
• digital documents
• Library consortia, Library cooperation, Resource sharing, Academic libraries, Research libraries, Illinois State, Uganda, Developing countries, Library collaboration,

Abstract

Government publications in electronic form exist in a gap between differing expectations. Traditionally government publications have been formal, and deliberately retained for many years. However, materials posted on Websites are often ephemeral. Both government Website staffs and users seem unsure what is to become of an electronic publication after a small number of years. Further, there are many open questions concerning how electronic publications can be economically gathered, processed, retained, retrieved, and utilized, when the retrieval and utilization is projected to occur many years in the future. We have been deeply involved in the preservation of State of Illinois web materials for 46 months, and in similar work with six other US States for 12 months. This paper reviews the several categories of problems we have encountered in attempting to identify, iteratively gather, retain, index, search, and use these electronic publications. Most broadly, these problems include; incomplete conformance with many kinds of standards or conventions involving Websites, reliance on technologies and formats which are likely to become unavailable, issues affecting disk space consumption in the archives, insufficient quantity and quality of metadata for use in search, philosophical differences in how the contents of a Website ought to be accessed, and incomplete support for document access by a harvesting program. Shortcomings we experienced in harvester-based, and human-selected acquisitions are discussed. However, the State Libraries in all seven States we work with need to use external harvesters rather than working in a more tightly coupled arrangement involving the webmasters of many agencies. Electronic document archival work, conducted in large part from outside the many small government agencies, seems likely to be a continuing concern.

Publisher

Zhejiang University Press

Series/Report Name or Number

ICUDL 2005

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/16401

Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)

Institute of Museum and Library Services - National Leadership Grant LG-02030120

Owning Collections