It Could Happen to the Web

This morning I saw this piece of news on the National Security Archive Web site. The National Security Archive is a an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in the US.

Apparently the White House has not been doing stellar email records management. This issue was first surfaced last year and has reached its culmination in the courts. So, now, White House employees must allow their desktop computers to be searched for the missing emails from 2003-2005. And this statement has surfaced:

"The White House admitted it did nothing to stop people working in the White House from disposing of memory sticks, CDs, DVDs and zip drives that may have been the sole copies of missing e-mails on them."

When I first read about this issue last year, I remember noting that the same thing could happen around Web content. Look at the statement below and fill it in for your own organization:

(Your organization) admitted it did nothing to stop people working on its Web site from disposing of memory sticks, CDs, DVDs and zip drives that may been the sole copies of missing (Web content) on them.

Sound like a familiar story? Let's hope that organizational Web Managers and Web Records managers, particularly those under special constraints by the law (like Federal Web Managers), take this as a wake up call.