Maintaining Integrity in and Access to Public Digital Archives
Developing Standards for Handling Exclusion Requests
Archive Policy Special Interest Group Workshop
December 13 – 14, 2002
Room 202, South Hall
School of Information Management and Systems
University of California, Berkeley
Organizations responsible for the creation and operation of large scale
public digital archives frequently receive requests for removal of data
and records from their archives.
Standards and practices for handling these requests are urgently
needed, as demonstrated by recent events involving the Internet
Archive, Google, and the Church of Scientology. But many of the
most important questions have yet to be asked in a public forum, or
answered by the relevant stakeholders.
- When removal requests are received, how should they be handled
and documented?
- What notice of these exclusion requests should be given, and to
whom?
- Should different standards and practices apply to requests from
corporations, individuals, governments (domestic and 'foreign'), and
religious organizations?
- What appeals processes can be used to ensure materials are not
removed inappropriately?
- How can digital archivists stay our of conflicts between groups
in favor of or opposed to public access to certain content?
- How should archives respond to changes in the ownership of
material domain names?
- Is perpetual non-public preservation of disputed content part of
the solution?
- What are the technical limitations and possibilities for better
managing exclusions? Can we go beyond robots.txt-based approaches?
The Archive Policy Special Interest Group Workshop produced a set of
principles and bests practices digital archivists can use when
confronted with difficult decisions in handling exclusion
requests. This policy, has been adopted by the Internet Archive,
and is being evaluated by several other archives, search engines, and
libraries. The Archive Policy Special Interest Group’s Guidelines On
Maintaining Archival Integrity and Managing Removal Requests, which
were produced during and after the meeting, are available here.
For further information, please contact Jeff Ubois, j e f f -at- a r c h i
v e . o r g.