The World Wide Web as a Challenge: The Web Record. Records professionals also need to turn their attention to the implications of the World Wide Web as records and recordkeeping systems. Recently Nick Montfort, an “electronic novelist,” wrote that many Web sites give the impression that there is an archives of the Web, but that “These are not real archives, however, any more than home pages are real homes, or real pages. They do not preserve early versions of the site—they only keep the most popular old content online and accessible, for the sake of additional banner-ad revenue.” Montfort reminds us that the Web’s own incunabula lasted only a few years as opposed to print’s counterpart of half a century, and that much of this electronic pioneering has been already lost. Montfort also points out a remarkable fact about the Internet Archive project, that it lacks an archivist and that this has led to some serious problems with its more selective approach to preserving certain key sites (Montfort).

The amount of research related to records on the World Wide Web or the Web as a record is limited. One study was done about how state government archives were dealing with various state agencies use of the Web for recordkeeping, but this is nearly a solitary undertaking at this point. Charles McClure’s and J. Timothy Sprehe’s study, “Analysis and Development of Model Quality Guidelines for Electronic Records Management on State and Federal Websites,” completed in January 1998 and available at http://slis-two.lis.fsu.edu/~cmcclure/nhprc/nhprc_title.html, remains the only major analysis of the consideration of Web sites as records. Archivists and records managers need to team up and target certain types of Web sites with implications for long-term maintenance as records.

There needs to be consideration of how sites maintaining records for study, such as the previously mentioned sites on Holocaust assets and tobacco litigation, are being used and need to be kept in service over time. As these sites are changed with additions and new sources, how are these changes documented? Records professionals also need to identify full-text online publications in their field and critically important Web sites for professional work, such as many of the ones mentioned in this report, and develop mechanisms for their continued maintenance. The growing resources on the Web that are useful for professional work mandate more aggressive monitoring by the profession. These sites are too important to be left to the whims of individuals or even the institutions hosting them. Intervention will be needed, as we can see with the closing of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment on September 29, 1995 after twenty-three years of work, where an effort was made to save the “complete collection of OTA publications along with additional materials that illuminate the history and impact of the agency” (http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~ota/).