PRESERVATION AND LONG TERM ACCESS

The issues of preservation and long term access will be important for the new legislative information system. Much of the data in that system may exist only in digital format, and the question of how to ensure the preservation and long term access to the data in the new legislative information system must be answered before it is necessary to move on to the generation of technology beyond today's. Except for the problem of acid based paper, the invention of the printed book provided a solution to this problem for over 500 years. The current online systems have been in operation for less than 25 years and we now face the problem. Fortunately the advances in technology and the development of data standards such as SGML offer potential solutions to this problem in the future, but only if they are purposefully and effectively implemented from the beginning.

Because of the important role legislative histories play in the interpretation of Federal laws and regulations, the Working Group's design for a new legislative information system must plan for both the permanent archiving of core legislative data and its long-term accessibility. Legislative history, at whatever level of detail recorded, constitutes the framework from within which future legislative, judicial and executive actions will be taken, whether these are in the form of new legislation and amendments, court decisions, or agency rulemaking. For this reason, practically all legislative data collected must be indefinitely retained and constantly available.

An indefinite period of retention has the added benefit of meeting scholarly and public interest in the legislative process. Historical data can migrate to appropriate agencies with archival responsibility at a designated time and still have the potential to be integrated at the user interface level within the distributed computing environment that constitutes the legislative information system infrastructure. For purposes of security and reliability, certain data sets, particularly those in heavy demand, may be 'mirrored' or copied to more than one site.

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