GladysAnn Wells
Director and State Librarian
Arizona State Library and Archives
Archives and Public Records
Richard Pearce-Moses
Director of Digital Government Information
Arizona State Library and Archives
Archives and Public Records
Government agencies are publishing more and more documents exclusively on the web. Libraries must adapt how they identify and acquire materials for their collections in this new reality. The Arizona State Library and Archives developed a curatorial model based on the organization of websites, which parallels the organization of an archival collection and employs the archival principles of provenance and original order to curate and provide access to documents. The “Arizona Model” considers how the basic processes of identification and selection, acquisition, description, reference, and preservation have changed in the digital era. The model describes a number of technological tools that, when combined with human judgment, can help libraries and archives manage the enormous number of documents on the web.