At 02:05 9/08/01 +1000, Roger Clarke wrote:
>I've been beavering away at a paper on the ways in which the Internet's
>promise of freedoms is being undermined by measures pursued by governments
>and copyright-owning corporations...
Might be interesting to consider what happened to on-line information at
the first change of federal government of the web era. Some agencies did
the right thing and just stagged the material to say it was from a previous
government, other agencies deleted the old pages. Strictly speaking if they
kept an off-line copy that is okay. If that deleted all copies, that is a
crime under the archives act.
There is a relatively simple technical fix for this: have the Archives
Office which keep a copy of everything. The original government web service
was designed as a simple hierarchy of web sites and this has bee maintained
in the latest version. There is an index to all official government web
pages on the federal government home page <http://www.fed.gov.au/> and it
has a web crawler which goes around indexing them
<http://www.fed.gov.au/cgi-bin/showsearch.pl?type=normal&action=Metadata+Search+Screen>.
Adding something like Pandora <http://pandora.nla.gov.au/documents.html> to
keep copies would be relatively simple.
The government are not the only ones to delete embarrassing web pages. When
I went to look at the Sydney Olympic web site a few months ago I found it
had disappeared. Fortunately the National Library of Australia had copies
of the site in its PANDORA Archive:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/nla/pandora/socog.html
Tom Worthington FACS tom.worthington@tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd ABN: 17 088 714 309
http://www.tomw.net.au PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617
Visiting Fellow, Computer Science, Australian National University
Publications Director & Past President, Australian Computer Society
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