Better Than a Shoebox

There are two big stories about the public archiving of digital materials this month.

The first comes from my SCIWRITER partner, Mark Marino, who explains how literary hypertext and other forms of electronic literature that can be stored in a web-accessible format will be included in the nation's repository of documents to be preserved for posterity.

The Library of Congress has asked the Electronic Literature Organization to collect a sample of 300 web sites related to the field and to contribute that sample to the Internet Archive's Archive-It project. The sites selected will be crawled and archived to the extent that the Archive-It technology allows. The result will be full-text searchable collections of the spidered HTML files in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The ELO will enter metadata including a short description and keywords for each URL entered into the database. The ELO Board of Directors, Literary Advisory Board, membership, and community are encouraged to suggest sites here for three sets of links.

You can go to their wiki to learn more and find out how to contribute materials if you are a digital author or artist.

The other big story has to do with how "Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase have reached an agreement for the release of a totally unencumbered repository of 1.8 million pages of federal case law, including Courts of Appeals decisions back to 1950." According to this announcement, "The agreement calls for definitive paperwork approved by both parties within 30 days with Public.Resource.Org making developer snapshots of the archive available in early 2008. Public.Resource.Org is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in this transaction. The cases will be marked with a new Creative Commons mark—CC-Ø—that signals that there are no copyrights or other related rights attached to the content." Public Resource previously brokered a deal that made more public domain video available to the general public in digital form.