Tuesday, October 01, 2013

Shutdown's Effects on Website Maintenance

There have been a lot of articles about the effect of the federal government shutdown on the public.  One I hadn't thought about was website maintenance.  A student in my Advanced Legal Research class brought to my attention this morning this notice posted on the website of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the investigative arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  The public is informed that the website will not be maintained until after the shutdown comes to an end.  The DHS website carries a similar warning, and I assume that the websites of other federal agencies do as well.  This has a material effect on my students who are creating LibGuides (online research guides) as the major work product for the course.  More importantly, it has a serious impact on the public, who rely on the websites to interact with the government.  The ICE notice states, for example, that "Transactions submitted via this website might not be processed and we will not be able to respond to inquiries until after appropriations are enacted."    

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Oh, thank you for this post, Marie! It's just the time for my own class to be writing these. Gee!
Betsy