The House Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives held a hearing yesterday to address the Electronic Communications Preservation Act (H.R. 5811), sponsored by Chairman of the Committee Henry Waxman (D-CA-30), Chairman of the Subcommittee Wm. Lacy Clay (D-MO-1), and Rep. Paul Hodes (D-NH-2). The bill directs the Archivist of the United States to establish standards for the capture, management, retrieval, and preservation of White House e-mails and other electronic communications. The Committee’s Press Release, summary of the bill, and full text of the bill is available here.  Transcripts from the hearing are posted here.

Under the Federal Records Act, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is responsible for assisting Federal agencies in maintaining adequate and proper documentation of federal records.  Given the increased use of electronic communications, federal agencies are potentially creating (and discarding) messages that have the status of federal records.  According to a new report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), when GAO reviewed the e-mail management practices of four senior agencies officials they found that, although the agencies’ e-mail records management policies addressed the regulatory requirements, these requirements were not always met for the senior officials.

 

Despite early promising comments from new owner Rupert Murdoch, the Wall Street Journal announced last week that it will continue to charge users to access the majority of information contained on the newspaper's website. There is however a positive spin to the announcement:

Mr. Murdoch made his latest comments at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in answering a question. "We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of The Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering" for subscribers, he said. "The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive."

The Journal's decision bucks a recent trend of print publications, such the New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly, who have removed subscription barriers and made a large portion of their archives freely available online.

Public.Resource.org and FastCase recently announced plans to create a free database of federal caselaw accessible to anyone via the internet. The database will include all U.S. Supreme Court cases since 1754 and all U.S. Court of Appeals cases since 1950, and new cases will be added as they are published.

No word yet when the database will be released, but snapshots of the archive will be made available in early 2008.

[Press Release] 1.8 million pages of federal case law to become freely available