In our first post, we talked about how the End of Term partner institutions joined together in 2008 and 2009 to archive the U.S. government web at the end of the Bush administration.
The End of Term project team has resumed for a new 2012-2013 archive, and we need help identifying websites for collection, particularly those that might be most at-risk of change or deletion at the end of the current presidential term.
What you can do to help
The project team has access to some lists of U.S. Federal government domains and will use those as a baseline list of URLs to crawl. Lists include those of legislative branch domains, including Senator, Representative, legislative committee and leadership web presences, executive branch domains, domains found in directories such as www.USA.gov and www.uscourts.gov, however these lists are often not comprehensive, and we need help identifying URLs to archive.
Nominations of any U.S. Federal government domains or URLs are welcome, though there are a few topic areas that we particularly need assistance identifying, including but not limited to:
* Judicial Branch websites
* Important content or subdomains on very large websites (such as NASA.gov) that might be related to current Presidential policies
* Government content on non-government domains (.com, .edu, etc.)
Volunteers may contribute as much time and effort as they are able, whether it be a nomination of one website or five hundred sites.
Project participants may also want to search the 2008-2009 archive: if we missed something in that earlier archive, it’s likely we don’t know about it this time around, either! Please nominate any U.S. government URLs you feel would be important to archive.
For the last project, we pre-loaded our nomination tool with URLs and then had volunteers help vote things in or out of scope. This time we’re trying a different approach – the nomination tool has not been pre-loaded so whatever is added by our volunteers will be more clearly identified as priority URLs. Websites recommended by volunteers will be prioritized for more frequent and in-depth collection during the course of the project.
How to Nominate URLs
To contribute a URL to this project, simply visit the Nomination Tool (developed by University of North Texas Libraries) and start entering URLs. Volunteers are asked to submit some basic metadata about the site that they are nominating (title, branch of government, agency), and provide some information about themselves.
Project Timeframe
Internet Archive will begin a baseline crawl near the end of August, with our other partners crawling various aspects of the government web (depending on their interests) in the Fall of 2012. Websites nominated by our volunteers will be crawled in depth beginning in November and through February, at least. Depending on the outcome of the election, the project team will determine how much and how often to crawl in 2013. Access to the archive will come later. For more details about our proposed schedule, visit the EOT 2012 page on our website.
If you have any questions, please contact us at eotproject@loc.gov, here on this blog, or on Twitter @eotarchive.
Abbie Grotke
Web Archiving Team Lead
Library of Congress
Cathy Hartman
Associate Dean
University of North Texas Libraries
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Latest Comments