2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
Government Information, noted that government entities were making enormous
amounts of digital information available to the public, but most were failing to
manage the entire lifecycle of electronic government information from its creation
to its preservation, ensuring permanent public access along the way.
In March of 2007 they followed this up with the State-By-State Report on
Authentication of Online Legal Resources, documenting the relative trustworthiness
of state-level primary legal resources on the web. The report didn’t mince words:
A significant number of the state online legal resources are official but none
are authenticated or afford ready authentication by standard methods. State
online primary legal resources are therefore not sufficiently trustworthy.
In other words, if you can’t authenticate digital resources you can’t trust them. And
if organizations (i.e. lawyers) can’t “trust” electronic documents, they’re going to
insist on paper documents instead, building a chain of distrust that works against
the creation, use and (eventually) the preservation of digital information.
The AALL activities were supported by concurrent activities taking place in the GPO
and in a variety of other government agencies. The National Digital Information
Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress funded the work
of the Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation of State
Government Digital Information (MTSA) project, led by the Minnesota Historical
Society. MTSA explored the challenges of stewarding, preserving and providing
enhanced long-term access to legislative digital records.
When MTSA started in 2007 they entered the fray as state governments were
accelerating the movement away from paper-based authoring of official legislative
information to entirely digital workflows, including ones with digital materials as the
only officially published document.
The project focused significant attention on the “access” component of the lifecycle
of information, as they recognized early on that access was an effective catalyst for
investment; by demonstrating immediate value to funding sources and important
constituencies, they determined that it would be easier to justify and develop
support for preservation.
MTSA also recognized that these issues couldn’t be resolved by librarians and
archivists acting in isolation. With that in mind, they worked with a diverse coalition
of participants, including those that write the bills, committee reports, floor
proceedings and other legislative materials (such as the Minnesota Office of the
Revisor of Statutes); those that manage the technology that keeps the legislature
running (the Kansas Legislative Computer Services); national organizations that
provide research and technical assistance to state government policymakers on a