I was amused, therefore, to find in correspondence at the Library of Congress that Thomas Jefferson wrote about this in 1791 proving both that he was an astonishing thinker and that there is nothing new under the sun. Speaking of the records of the American revolution, he said:“Let us save what remains not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident."

This bulletin provides guidance on managing records produced when Federal agencies use web 2.0/social media platforms for Federal business. Open and transparent government increasingly relies on the use of these technologies, and as agencies adopt these tools, they must comply with all records management laws, regulations, and policies. Successful compliance involves the active participation of agency records management staff, web managers, social media managers, information technology staff, privacy and information security staff, and other relevant stakeholders.

Late last week, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration released a long-anticipated bulletins concerning management of records created as a result of federal agency usage of Web 2.0 and social media tools to conduct government business. It details how to determine whether social media and Web 2.0 content meets the Federal Records Act definition of a government record, highlight the records management challenges particular to Web 2.0 and social media records, and outline how agencies can address some of these challenges. It also stress that agencies are responsible for managing records that are housed by third-party service providers.

Its tempting to see things only from our (by that I mean the archival community) side of the fence – to lament the inevitable decline in our future professional role that the handing over of content to commercial external service providers for its long term preservation will entail and to worry about what it may mean for the archives (and their users) of the future. But maybe we should also pause to reflect on what it may mean for these service providers themselves and whether they actually have as much concern about the implications of this new found responsibility on their side as we do on ours.

What I’m working on now is exploring ideas about what it means to build “participatory archives.” The concept draws upon the work our colleagues have done in defining concepts for the participatory library and the participatory museum, as well as on the general concept of participatory culture.

When I attended SAA this year, I was fortunate to meet lots of experienced archivists–many of whom were excited to meet me because I post drawings on the Internet. But you’ve probably read their papers and seen their conference presentations and subscribed to their blogs already.

I also met some great students and recent grads. You probably wouldn’t recognize most of their names. And these are the people I want to talk about, because I worry about them, archivists. It is amazing the things that people will tell you when you have no power to hire anyone, and now I’m angry. Really angry. It almost makes me want to…howl?

Working within the context of a range of metadata related initiatives in Australia and elsewhere, the Recordkeeping Metadata Project aims to comprehensively specify and codify recordkeeping metadata in ways that enable it to be fully understood and deployed both within and beyond the records and archives profession.

I hate to keep harping on this point, but the more I think about it, the more concerned I am becoming that the notion of digital curation is an inadequate notion on which to sell a program for electronic records or digital archives.....In other words, a major campus committee looking at the future recommends that a major part of its vision revolve around preserving publications and datasets.

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said the Census, which takes place every 10 years, was an expensive and inaccurate way of measuring the number of people in Britain. Instead, the Government is examining different and cheaper ways to count the population more regularly, using existing public and private databases, including credit reference agencies.

The official title for this session is “Discovery Tools for Archival Collections: Getting the Most Out of Your Metadata” and was divided into two presentations with introduction and question moderation by Jaime L. Margalotti, senior assistant librarian in Special Collections at the University of Delaware.

Most, if not all, of the development work concerning digital repositories focuses on meeting the requirements of the OAIS reference model. However, the reference model itself has nothing to say about how records should be selected for deposit.

Internet for Archives is a free online tutorial to help university students develop their Internet research skills.

An ongoing list of government documents with weird or funny names