America's Next Top Information Professional

This update from the Whitehouse blog is full of interesting statements, but this was my favorite part:

“Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology. Past practices too often resulted in inefficient use of purchased IT capabilities across the federal government. We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.”

From an archival point of view, I want to point out that sometimes those IT restrictions ARE necessary. Not to overgeneralize, but the forms and registers that governments use have been developed over the ages because they provide sufficient evidence of how those governments work. While there is obviously room for improvement, we need to be wary about how we adopt exciting new technologies, especially in terms of necessary recordkeeping. Nonetheless, this should be an interesting endeavor. I have a lot to learn about cloud computing, by the way.

On a related note, apparently, the WH is “archiving” user contributions to social media websites. It’s odd that this article has such a spin towards a potential violation of privacy. I got an email about this from the Society of American Archivists listserv. As the sender noted, “How can collecting information that was deliberately and voluntarily posted to a publicly accessible website violate anybody’s privacy?” I suspect the issue is that this information was posted on third-party sites, including Facebook and Youtube, rather than directly on the White House website. The allusion to the Presidential Records Act surprises me: my understanding was that the Act is limited to records created BY the presidency, not things ABOUT it.