I’d like to get my news about records implications of government social media use from the National Archives, not Mashable.com

This post is not a criticism of Mashable–I love them, and I’m very happy that someone is finally pointing out the relevance of the Presidential Records Act in regard to all the fuss we’ve seen about how the White House needs to preserve the comments they receive via social media. Here’s the Mashable story.

My point is that I am really hoping that when David Ferriero takes over as our new Archivist of the United States, he is willing and able to be an active public voice on archival issues like these. As soon as a story like this breaks–and they break more often than you’d think–I would like to see a quick coherent response from him that makes it into the media coverage of the story. I’m giving this post the category “leadership” because that’s one of things I’m really hoping we see Mr. (or is Dr.?) Ferriero bring to the National Archives, and by extension, to our profession. And maybe if we’re really lucky we’ll get a leader who understands social media too.

3 Comments

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  By Kate T., September 16, 2009 @ 6:51 pm

  I also noted that the image of the National Archives building that Mashable used to illustrate their post was taken from NARA’s Flickr photostream. It’s nice that these images are now available for this kind of use.

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  By Kate T., September 18, 2009 @ 8:18 am

  Another good story on this from OMB Watch:

  http://www.ombwatch.org/node/10398

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  By Kate T., September 22, 2009 @ 6:56 am

  And now we have this excellent post from the White House’s own blog:

  http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Reality-Check-The-Presidential-Records-Act/

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