On December 14, 2005, the Sacramento Bee reported on the loss of state and federal government documents that were once posted on the net and then cleaned out after a period of time. Currently, there is no uniform or consistent procedure to avoid losing government materials. According to the news article, a conservative estimate puts the loss at about half of whatever was posted on the net by the government. An information officer noted that “We probably don’t even know what we’re losing.” Another interviewee described this as “digital death” and the “digital dark ages.” The complexities involved with publishing online by government agencies have helped to create havoc with timelines, security, costs, and preservation. It turns out that “digital archiving” is more costly than expected because technicians must be paid to upload and maintain the documents, and “[s]oftware must be written or adapted to capture and authenticate the staggering amounts of data.”
While others worry that our legislators are not thinking about the catastrophic loss of digital documents, we at Legislative Intent Service have been giving it some very serious thought for years now. Our collection is mostly paper, gathered these 30 years, and is slowly, but surely, being digitized to meet our clients’ needs for online research services. The Sacramento Bee noted that:
“People come in from the agencies, from the Governor’s Office, from the Legislature wanting examples of what took place in 1950, in 1960, ’70 or ’80. . . . They want to see what’s happened before so they can go forward.”
Our collection includes a lot of these missing agency documents from the 50’s (and earlier!), 60’s, 70’s and 80’s as well as later digital materials (saved in paper form) that were collected on legislation enacted in the 90’s and into the 21st Century that may no longer be available online or from any other source. The Sacramento Bee article concluded with the following quote by the chief of state library services for the California State Library: “If we absolutely, positively want to ensure that we have the item in 150 years, . . . our best preservation is print.” This is something we have at Legislative Intent Service – nearly 9 million documents worth of “print,” at your service in the 21st Century!
