TrendWatch Blog
Records management for .gov websites
17-Sep-2004
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has issued long-awaited guidance on the submission of web content that represents "permanent records" to the Archive. Federal web managers will surely hope that only a small proportion of their content consititutes such records (probably true), because those pages are going to need some serious massaging first. For starters, all dynamic content needs to be baked out as static HTML (can your CMS do that?). Internal links must be modified as necessary to resolve for all time; most external links must be stripped (just the HREFs, not the text!). The document provides a slew of other guidance as well -- see section 6.3 in particular. NARA points out that agencies will probably want to resort to some sort of harvester. Everyone agrees that preserving web records is important, but almost no one does it. In the U.S. federal sector, that's going to change...
NARA's Web Content Preservation Guidance
- Submitted by: Tony Byrne, Analyst
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