6 Years Later
To start this, I am going to be entirely self-serving by quoting myself:
California has a large, well-organized state library, which maintains a catalog of material that the state has published, with information on how it can be accessed by other agencies and the public. A recent report on current efforts of state governments to provide permanent public access (PPA) to electronic information found that the state of California has made only inconsistent efforts to preserve access to digital information, despite the attempts of the state library: “Due to limited staff and other resources, it is often difficult for the state library to capture many electronic government documents.”In a May 2003 catalog of California state publications, there was an entry for an e-commerce report published and placed on the state government Web site in PDF format in 2000. According to the catalog entry, the publication is out of print, but the PDF file was still accessible on the Web via IA. However, the PDF has since been removed from IA’s server.
In effect, the state of California is relying on a private nonprofit to provide public access to public information.
From "From Ephemeral to Enduring: The Internet Archive's Role in Preserving Digital Media"
Apparently, not much has changed from 7 years ago:
Posting documents online was meant to increase the public’s access to the workings of government, but it’s actually having the opposite effect. For years now, official government records created electronically have been vanishing. And while a June 21, 2009 University of California press release makes mention of “the wholesale disappearance of information,” no one seems to be able to quantify the extent of losses.“The problem is, I don’t think anybody has done a scientific evaluation of exactly how many electronic-only documents of California state government are disappearing,” David Cismowski, the State Library’s bureau chief for library services, e-mailed on Jan. 7.
...
None of this is new. In fact, the deletion — accidental or purposeful — of state e-records has been going on a long time. This is made clear by examining two state reports, both released in August 2004. Ironically, despite the fact that they’re nearly six years old, the reports represent the most recent studies of the loss of government e-records.
-- From "Official state records are disappearing"
I'm glad the California Digital Library has stepped up to the plate with a crawl of the ca.gov domain. I'm glad the California State Library is still trying to keep track of state gov docs. And yet, I suspect it's not enough, that these efforts are like taking two regular-sized funnels and heading off to Niagara Falls.
Are crawls and catalogs enough? Can a repository model? Is there a way we can make gov docs have the same shelf-life as messages in Gmail? Or is this much ado about nothing and CA is comparable to other states in their retention and access to born-digital government information?