U.S. Dept of the Interior: Records Destruction Request

I am forwarding this email from Stanford’s government documents librarian as it is something that will impact all your users.  Scary stuff happening in the U.S. Government.  Please alert your faculty, staff, and students.
Joe Wible
Hopkins Marine Station Librarian, emeritus
Hi all,

I wanted to alert you to a very disturbing thing happening in the National Archives world that may severely impact research, especially historical and scientific research. The Dept of interior is asking for permission to destroy records about oil and gas leases, mining, dams, wells, timber sales, marine conservation, fishing, endangered species, non-endangered species, critical habitats, land acquisition, and lots more. Basically records from every agency within the Interior Department, including the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, US Fish & Wildlife Service, US Geological Survey, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and others. This is all content that would normally go to NARA for collection and preservation. This is disturbing because previous administrations would obfuscate records by classifying/reclassifying records. This admin is basically just destroying records so they’ll never be accessible.

There’s an October 29 deadline for comment to NARA: request.schedule@nara.gov /// fax: 301-837-3698 /// NARA (ACRA), 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park MD 20740-6001. (Be sure to say that you’re referring to DAA-0048-2015-0003.) Please forward to your networks and researchers who may be effected.

More information: https://altgov2.org/doi-records-destruction/

NARA’s appraisal memo  https://altgov2.org/wp-content/uploads/DAA-0048-2015-0003_Appraisal_Memo.pdf   

This is tragic and terrible.

james



—
James R. Jacobs
US Government Information Librarian
123D Green Library
Stanford University
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E: jrjacobs@stanford.edu
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October 24, 2018 · Filed under Announcements

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