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Re: Federal Agency Intranet Preservation



Michael Ravnitzky raises an interesting point about the need to preserve
agency Intranet pages as well as Internet pages.  But preservation and access
are two very different issues.  Is Mr. Ravnitzky right in saying that there
is "rather little justification" for keeping Intranet-posted material
"nonpublic and segregated from the public web site?"   What if you view
 internal web sites as the equivalent of old-style file cabinets in offices,
in which agency employees might store hard copies of circulars, bulletins,
announcements and internal documents?  In the olden days, copies of some of
these items would have been available to the public in an agency's library
(consider that the equivalent to an external web site), others not.  So if
you went back in time to a period before the Intranet, would outsiders have
been able to gain access to all the documents in these mythical office filing
cabinets?  Would agency personnel simply copy the contents of an entire
filing cabinet for an external requester?  Of course not.  They would have to
examine each filed item individually in order to determine if was releasable
in response to a freedom of information request.   That being the case, you
probably cannot apply any blanket characterizations to the releasability of
all information on agency Intranet pages.