Good news and bad news for access to government information

The mission of the National Archives is to "...serve(s) American democracy by safeguarding and preserving the records of our Government, ensuring that the people can discover, use, and learn from this documentary heritage." And since these records are increasingly available only in electronic form, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) conducts regular harvests to capture this data for preservation. Their latest harvest of House and Senate public web sites happened between November 11 and December 11 of 2006. The more than 4,000,000 pages (42 GB) of information can be browsed or keyword searched at the NARA website.

In the bad news category, one might wonder if future historians might have trouble doing their research. Last month the AP reported that: "More than 1 million pages of historical government documents — a stack taller than the U.S. Capitol — have been removed from public view since the September 2001 terror attacks, according to records obtained by The Associated Press. Some of the papers are more than a century old. In some cases, entire file boxes were removed without significant review because the government's central record-keeping agency, the National Archives and Records Administration, did not have time for a more thorough audit."