Publishing trends within state government: The situation in North Carolina

Selection practices for Web-based government publications in state depository library programs: Comparing active and passive approaches

“…For those states that employ a selective collection approach, selection decisions in Web publication preservation projects are complicated by a number of factors. Real preservation challenges stem from the short life of government information (California Digital Library, 2003) and the lack of agency efforts to restoring and retaining retrospective information (Martin, 2004). Research shows that agency webmasters are usually more concerned with providing current and updated information and enhancing the user experiences by improving the "looks" and the functionalities of the Web sites rather than providing long-term access to superceded or noncurrent publications (Martin, 2004); a Web document may be removed as long as the agency considers it has served its current missions without thought to its continued value to the public.…”

“…Previous research suggested that the average length of existence of a Web document in government agency sites is four months (Cho & Garcia-Molina, 2000). Further, many agencies do not have plans to retain and restore the removed born-digital information resources (Martin, 2004), and many states do not legally mandate such retention efforts by the agencies (Matthews, et al, 2003). If the state libraries fail to capture a Web publication in time, it may be lost forever.…”

“…For government agencies, Web publishing has several advantages over printing. It is considered a costeffective means of information dissemination, especially in times of budget cuts (Mullen, 2001;Martin, 2004); Web content is easy to maintain and update (Martin, 2004), and it potentially provides improved access (Mullen, 2001), enhances government-citizen interaction experiences (Clayton & Gregory, 2003;Reddick, 2005), and encourages civic participation (Larson & Rainie, 2002;Horrigan, 2004). For depository library programs, however, the shift from print to Web publications requires dramatic rearrangement of work processes.…”

The North Carolina State Government Website Archives: A case study of an American government Web archiving project

“…The analysis also revealed that agencies frequently pull content from their site. Of 333 digital serials available through the Web in 2003, only 165 titles had back issues available online (Martin 2004). As new information supersedes older information, state agencies both replace the information on the Web and discard the 'offline' content.…”

“…The results of a survey completed in 2003 confirmed that approximately half of all state publications were produced in digital format only, and a third of state agencies predicted that more than ninety percent of their publications would be born-digital within 5 years (Martin 2004 publications shifting to digital formats, but new presentation options available through the World Wide Web had blurred the traditional distinctions between publications and records. With the exception of Intranet pages, websites are publicly available and thus may be considered published.…”