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Re: Federal Agency Intranet Preservation



Title: Re: Federal Agency Intranet Preservation
My point is as agencies shift from maintaining administrative records on paper to maintaining them online, they are arbitrarily moving sectors of their documentation to their internal employees only intranet sites.  After examining most of these intranet sites at the federal level, as well as a few state sites, via Freedom of information act requests, I am of the opinion that there is some material of permanent retention value and certainly some historical significance.  Not all of it mind you, but certainly some.  And right now, records retention with respect to official websites overlooks the value and importance of some of these intranet sites.

Furthermore, when I have requested certain items from these restricted intranet sites, they are generally provided because in most cases there is no justifiable reason for keeping them secret.  In some cases, they have been moved to the internet site.

I've observed that there is a kneejerk reaction to place anything sensitive or administratively significant on the internal sites, one which overcomes the evolving realization that it is just as simple to provide information externally as it is to provide the same information internally, and saves a lot of pointless public inquiries, with the associated drain on staff resources.

Michael Ravnitzky
mikerav@ix.netcom.com


on 2/6/01 7:17 AM, Maarja@aol.com at Maarja@aol.com wrote:

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.