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Erasing history

Reader comment on item: Erasing the George W. Bush Administration Online

Submitted by Fred Calm (United States), Jul 12, 2010 at 11:39

Disagree somewhat. Web sites are communications tools, and requiring new administrations to honor links to prior administrations' material imposes prior administrations' hierarchical organization of web pages or taxonomy of messaging on the current and future administrations. Agree fully that losing access to source documents amounts not so much to historical revisionism as historical amnesia. Two approaches to balancing the opposing needs of, an the one hand, an administration controlling how it presents itself and on the other, access to archival materials.

1. Archive.org is a partial solution provided by a third-party organization, so access to some former material on whitehouse.gov may be available through them.

2. Congress should enact a law requriring the White House and Federal Departments and agencies to automatically archive their web sites and each web page to provide a "permalink" to its chronologically archived version. It's an ugly compromise that assumes that it is both technically feasible and economically affordableavailability to provide reliable access to massive (and growing) amounts of information. People who are interested in permanence should use the permalinks, not the ephemeral surface links.

Librarians and archivists wrestle with the issues of how to organize and index news sites and online journals whose content is always changing, especially online-only publications that do not publish discrete editions. Perhaps people in that field have some thoughts about how to deal with this.

Submitting....

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Reader comments (27) on this item

Title Commenter Date Thread
The same is true for French public website such as Elysée [186 words]Chemla VéroniqueMay 19, 2012 05:07195689
Missing Bush Administration Documents/Communications [51 words]prwoodDec 16, 2010 19:12181050
Where the Bush administration now resides [89 words]David GerstmanAug 31, 2010 09:26177499
2Undoing damage they had done us [149 words]Tim PAug 27, 2010 14:09177362
This is a general problem [56 words]Thomas HerzelJul 13, 2010 09:29175513
Solutions [19 words]MircoJul 15, 2010 18:42175513
Presidential Transition [71 words]Edward SteinhouseJul 12, 2010 21:31175478
Deletion of previous administration's Internet materials [73 words]Vazir MukhtarJul 13, 2010 20:41175478
Erasing George Bush online [171 words]IsaacJul 12, 2010 16:51175470
Lion pride [22 words]2outspokenJul 12, 2010 14:53175466
Removal of previous administrations' Internet sites and information [141 words]Vazir MukharJul 12, 2010 12:14175458
Erasing history [226 words]Fred CalmJul 12, 2010 11:39175456
We are doomed to make the mistakes history can no longer prevent. [198 words]Clarita N. GlomskiJul 3, 2010 03:53175082
O'Brien Comments [3 words]Progressive EdJul 3, 2010 01:01175077
King is dead, long live the King ! [53 words]B ShahJun 30, 2010 04:44175010
Free comments [14 words]yenor galazioJun 29, 2010 09:44174982
because they can [70 words]mythJun 26, 2010 21:32174885
The Webmaster [24 words]Mark DJun 26, 2010 02:15174852
Quality [47 words]Mark D.Jun 26, 2010 02:10174851
Does The United States Really Have a President? [45 words]AlexJun 25, 2010 13:28174828
White House RSS Feeds [84 words]Mark PrestonJun 25, 2010 12:30174824
petty politics. . . it is sad... in a great democracy knowledge should be king ! [69 words]Phil GreendJun 26, 2010 19:37174824
petty-minds [23 words]G.VishvasJun 28, 2010 06:27174824
Not necessarily [51 words]soccer dadJun 25, 2010 11:20174821
Notification [75 words]Mark D.Jun 26, 2010 02:04174821
The reason is clear... [30 words]Mark GJun 25, 2010 11:00174820
Servers are expensive [36 words]KatrinaJun 30, 2010 17:05174820

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Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".

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