Canvassing opinion on third party archiving and caching of government websites

Hi all

New thread for a change: what does everyone think about government departments adding "noarchive" robots directives (and their variations) [1,2] to their websites and pages?

I suspect most of you know what I am talking about. In case not, it has at least these effects:

* requests non-retention of the revision history in sites like the Wayback Machine [3]
* requests that search engines do not make cached copies of resources available to searchers

It's probably worth highlighting that these are not technically enforceable preventions, but are requests honoured voluntarily by the big players.

For my personal opinion, it's against openness and does nothing to encourage good governance in publishing processes. I'd like to know what you think.

Cheers

Hugh Barnes
Resource Discovery Officer, Online Services Unit
Information Management
Department of Communities
Phone: +61 7 324 74533 | Fax: +61 7 3247 4534
Email: hugh.barnes@disability.qld.gov.au

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_Exclusion_Standard

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_element#The_robots_attribute

[3] http://web.archive.org




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Received on Friday, 5 June 2009 03:25:52 UTC