This article discusses how e-mail and e-mail archives can serve as legacy for individuals, families, and societies. Toward this end, it outlines the scope and scale of e-mail as a tool and a task, and gives an overview of the many individual, group, and institutional factors in e-mail management that influence the form and contents of e-mail…

Federal mandates requiring that publicly funded research be made openly accessible recast scholarly information as public information and provide an impetus to join the efforts of scholarly communication and government information programs in United States research libraries. Most major research libraries are long-standing participants in the…

Introduction: This study explores the extent to which an institutional repository makes papers available and accessible on the open Web by using 170 journal articles housed in DigiNole Commons, the institutional repository at Florida State University. Method: To analyse the repository's impact on availability and accessibility, we conducted…

Data are a valuable national resource for a variety of stakeholders across all sectors of society. Dramatic advances in information and communication technology have opened up unprecedented opportunities for broad public access, innovative research, and citizen engagement, but this potential can be realized only if data are properly managed and…

This article reviews the history of open access (OA) policies and examines the current status of mandate policy implementations. It finds that hundreds of policies have been proposed and adopted at various organizational levels and many of them have shown a positive effect on the rate of repository content accumulation. However, it also detects…

Copyright is extremely complex, and it is difficult to convey its complexities in a clear and concise form. Through decades of experience, archivists developed informal best practices for dealing with copyright in the analog world; however the application of copyright in the digital environment is evolving in response to rapidly changing…

Although every state in the country has recognized the importance of government transparency by enacting open government provisions, few of those statutes require training programs to encourage records custodians to comply with the law. Ten states mandate training in how to legally respond to public records requests, and some mandates are stronger…

Institutional repositories have been established by most university libraries but their level of success has varied. Determining what belongs in such repositories has been the subject of some discussion but research would suggest that a broader rather than narrower compass is a positive approach to adopt. By seeking out a variety of content types,…

Selective archiving of Web sites in Australia has been under way since 1996. This approach has seen carefully selected sites preserved after site owners granted permission. The labor-intensive nature of this process means only a small number of sites can ever be acquired in this manner. An alternate approach is an automated…

Federal agencies are increasingly using electronic means to create, exchange, and store information, and in doing so, they frequently create federal records: that is, information, in whatever form, that documents government functions, activities, decisions, and other important transactions. As the volume of electronic information grows, so does…

During his life and career as a muckraking journalist in Washington, Jack Anderson cultivated secret sources throughout the halls of government--sources who passed on information that allowed Anderson to investigate and write about Watergate, CIA assassination schemes, and countless scandals. His syndicated column, Washington Merry-Go-Round,…

Governments, public funders of research and universities worldwide are increasingly recognising that improving the dissemination of research raises their research profile and contributes to national competitiveness. The traditional system of research publishing is inefficient, uncompetitive and restrictive. It limits access by researchers and…

This article examines the current phenomenon of blogging from an archival point of view. To better understand the nature of blogs, the author conducted an informal survey of bloggers at Princeton Theological Seminary. The results of this survey show that blogs represent a dynamic but ephemeral new form of electronic record and writing practice.…

This article examines what is implied by the term "trusted" in the phrase "trusted digital repositories." Digital repositories should be able to preserve electronic materials for periods at least comparable to existing preservation methods. Our collective lack of experience with preserving digital objects and consensus about the reliability of our…