A major piece of our national history happens online everyday. The importance of this is not lost on the Library of Congress and its partner organizations.

Last Thursday the Library of Congress (LOC) announced a plan to preserve government websites in the waning days of the Bush administration. This is great news and it comes a few months after I reported that the National Archives and Records Administration chose not to do an end-of-term government web harvest for the exiting Bush administration....

John McCain is allegedly learning how to use a computer, but it will take more than Ctrl-Alt-Delete to keep the government's information technology on track.

Information technology (IT), if managed correctly, can deliver great benefits—IT was the largest contributor to U.S. economic growth in the late 1990's. Unfortunately, the government wastes millions, if not billions on a failed enterprise IT projects every year. And the Executive Branch doesn't even know how much it spends to maintain its 24,000+ websites, including one Army site dedicated to herding cats....

The government came out with its best copyright-free photo library yet, NASA Images at www.nasaimages.org!

Search the Best Copyright-Free Photos:

About a year ago, I ranked the top 10 copyright-free photo libraries from the government. NASA came in surprisingly low with the NASA Image Exchange in ninth place, but the new NASA Images site clearly deserves first place.

NASA Images is actually a public—non-profit partnership between NASA and Internet Archive that began in 2007....

Google has a new trick—using its search results to subvert one of its competitors.

Google gets most of its multi-billion dollar revenue through advertising. So naturally Google would want to protect that revenue from its competitors. But using censorship to do so is wrong....

We need to rethink government websites as we know them. This is the conclusion of four Princeton academics: Robins, Yu, Zeller, and Felten. Their points have merit, but the approach needs tweaking.

In summary, Government Data and the Invisible Hand argues that federal websites should:...

Chlorine gas in a D.C. park and airborne lead compounds beside historic Old Town Alexandria—these are just two toxic air emissions among thousands reported in EPA's Toxic Release Inventory.

The Environmental Protection Agency's Toxic Release Inventory is a great example of government data made available for others to make mashups. Last week I coded a simple mashup using EPA's data that makes it easy to find toxic air emissions in your own backyard. Please explore it and let me know what you think! (It is optimized for Firefox browsers.)...

It's official—there is "widespread confusion and lack of understanding" among agencies about federal recordkeeping obligations.

This is a finding from a study conducted by the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The study focused on federal recordkeeping policies for email. But there is reason to believe that the picture is similar for agency web records, because compliance with NARA's web records guidelines is low....

U.S. government works are free of copyright (public domain). This includes all videos and films produced by federal employees as part of their official duty. However, limitations may still apply, if copyrighted material appears in a video.

Based on an extensive review of government video libraries, I recommend the following 11 collections. The video libraries are broken into four categories followed by six tips to improve government videos:

Search the Best Copyright-Free Photos:

Top News Video Libraries

#1 — DODvClips

Very up-to-date military news in a television newscast format streamed online by the Department of Defense. The site includes several "channels" for top news, interviews, front line stories, and more. The production quality, timeliness, and anchorwoman are professional grade. On the downside: some videos do not have dates, and the "play" and "playlist" buttons are visually associated with the wrong videos.

Production Quality: Excellent!
Update Frequency: Several videos added daily
Accessible?: No—neither captioning nor transcripts...

The agency we trust our national history to is about to let millions of web pages disappear to history.

For the first time since the Internet began, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) will not record a snapshot of Executive Branch websites at the end of a Presidential administration.

In a recent NARA memo (NWM 13.2008) a high-ranking NARA official wrote:...

Government officials are receiving some much-needed schooling on how to use the web to improve lawmaking.

The Sunlight Foundation just launched PublicMarkup.org, the first site to collaboratively and publicly "markup" a bill before it becomes law. Markup is when a bill is discussed, debated, and revised by lawmakers, but in this case anyone may participate.

Through this markup process, PublicMarkup.org allows many-to-many communications. It allows concerned citizens to discuss the pros, the cons, the alternatives, and to build off of others' ideas. It is what participatory democracy is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, it is widely-accepted that the federal government's attempt to use the internet for regulations commenting (Regulations.gov) has been a failure....