If you go to whitehouse.gov, it’s all new and shiny, with very little content. It’s strictly about the Obama Presidency, which is less than three hours old.
So where did the eight years’ worth of Web content from the Bush Presidency go? Maybe it doesn’t belong on whitehouse.gov anymore, but surely it should be available somewhere for reference purposes. (Especially all those “Iraq: Denial and Deceit” logos from the early part of the decade. :)) Hell, whatever Web content was on the whitehouse.gov website at the end of the Clinton Administration, which AFAICT wasn’t available (or was simply well hidden) during the Bush years, really belongs online somewhere as well.
So is this stuff online somewhere, or has it all just disappeared? (Aside from those ‘wayback machine’ websites, of course.)
The materials become the property of the National Archives, which will administer them through the Bush library.
Here is a link to the Clinton records.
Every four years there is an electronic “snapshot” taken of all federal web sites. Each snapshot is then archived in the National Archives.
We received orders from the White House several months ago there would be no snapshot taken of any federal web site as part of the administration change. I can honestly state many federal web administrators defied the order not just out of principle, but because their federal records retention regulations required it.
I don’t suppose you happen to know which ones didn’t? This makes me curious.
Why only every four years? I mean, archive.org picks up websites on at least a monthly basis. A snapshot of a website every four years leaves a massive amount of time to miss things that change on the page… And they could just do it automatically like archive.org does.