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From: Carl It is perhaps of no great shock to anybody that a deal has been reached between the National Archives and a private contractor, for digitization of our national heritage. As these things always go, the private sector will add lots of value to this otherwise unusable bunch of useless data in return for certain assurances from the government. Here's the press release: http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2007/nr07-41.html As is of course required for any government procurement, a copy of the contract is available for everybody to look at: http://www.archives.gov/iarchives/iarchives-digitization-agreement.html The digitization effort is being provided an honest-to-goodness web 2.0 .com startup: http://www.footnote.com/ "Millions of original documents - most never seen on the web before." And, if you read the footnote.com terms of service, you'll note that our national heritage has been re-classified as adults-only. You have to be 18 to get an account and under no circumstances may anybody under 13 be allowed to look at archival documents: http://www.footnote.com/termsandconditions.php The National Archives receives a copy of all the digital media for their archives, but the contract prohibits the Internet Archive (or anybody else for that matter) from having a copy of that data. It is amazing to me how often the government goes down the road of trying to privatize public information. _______________________________________________ Infowarrior mailing list Infowarrior@attrition.org https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior