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....

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....

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:...