<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Internet Happenings, Events and Sources


Tuesday, July 13, 2004  

Fugitive Documents Evade Federal Depositories
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0621/pol-crisis-06-21-04.asp

The Federal Depository Library Program is losing the race to keep up with cataloging and preserving access to Web-only government documents. "This is not a problem; this is a crisis," says Daniel Greenstein, head of the California Digital Library, which serves the 10 libraries in the University of California system. To capture those missing documents, known as fugitive documents, the Government Printing Office is contemplating using Web-harvesting technologies, but GPO officials acknowledge that Web-crawler and datamining technologies might prove inadequate for rounding up much of the information the government publishes online. Greenstein notes that while Web-crawlers are fairly good at capturing documents from the Web's surface, they miss much of the information on the so-called Deep Web, where databases and dynamic Web pages reside. A recent California Digital Library study found that about 85% of the Deep Web is in the .gov domain. GPO officials have enlisted the help of the University of North Texas Libraries to maintain a collection of electronic documents known as the Cyber Cemetery, but they acknowledge they have no idea how many fugitive documents they're missing. "If we knew where they were to count them, then they wouldn't be fugitive," says Judith Russell, superintendent of documents. But other institutions, such as the California Digital Library, say they can't wait for the government to solve the problem and are committing staff and funding to maintain their electronic collections of government information. This has been added to the article section of Deep Web Research Subject Tracer™ Information Blog.

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:05 AM
archives
subject tracers™