Home » Posts tagged 'EOT'
Tag Archives: EOT
Good Forbes piece on the End of Term crawl
Check out this recent piece in Forbes about the End of Term project (eotarchive.org). And if you’re so moved to help out, you can nominate any federal government url through our handy nomination tool. There’s still time to help us save democracy’s information!
Meet The Citizens Racing To Save Government Websites From Vanishing. Leslie Katz, Forbes, Oct 23, 2024
…With the Nov. 5 election just a week away, they’re harvesting vast amounts of government data before the White House welcomes new residents or former ones in January. The information will live on in the End of Term Web Archive, a giant repository of federal government websites preserved for the historical record as one administrative term ends and a new one begins. Librarians, archivists and technologists across the country join forces every four years to donate time, effort and resources to what they dub the end-of-term crawl, with the resulting datasets available to the public for free…
“Citizens have a right to access information about what their government is doing in their name,” says James Jacobs, a government information librarian at Stanford University, an End of Term Web Archive project partner. “That’s why libraries have long collected these materials to make sure they are organized, preserved and easily accessible for the long term.”
End of Term crawl 2024 is now underway!
Well it’s that time again. The 2024 End of Term web crawl of the federal .gov/.mil web space (and other domains 🙂 ) has begun. We have just posted our first public announcement on the Internet Archive blog.
As we have done since 2008 (NARA did the first comprehensive crawl in 2004), a group of volunteers from the Internet Archive, GPO, Library of Congress, NARA, University of North Texas, and Stanford will be doing a “comprehensive” web harvest of the Federal government’s web space. For more information and background on the project, see our home page at https://eotarchive.org/. These archives can be searched full-text via the Internet Archive’s collections search (https://web.archive.org/) and also downloaded as bulk data for machine-assisted analysis from the project site.
But MOST IMPORTANTLY, we need YOUR help! We are currently accepting nominations for websites to be included in the 2024 End of Term Web Archive. Submit a url nomination by going to our nomination tool (hosted by University of North Texas!) and clicking the big yellow “add a url” button in the top right:
https://digital2.library.unt.edu/nomination/eth2024/
We encourage you to nominate any and all U.S. federal government websites that you want to make sure get captured. We’re also interested in any and all urls of federal sites that are NOT hosted on .gov/.mil (there are lots of federal government sites hosted on .edu, .org, and even .com! That includes social media but also research labs and other private/public partnerships). We already have a solid list of top level domains (eg epa.gov, congress.gov, defense.mil etc). Nominating urls deep within .gov/.mil websites helps to make our web crawls as thorough and complete as possible. Prizes will be awarded for most url nominations by individuals and institutions!
So get to it! Help us do the most complete crawl we can and also assure that the sites/publications/videos/data etc that are most important to YOU make it into the archive!!
The EPA’s Website after a year of climate change censorship
Here’s a good article from Time Magazine — “Here’s What the EPA’s Website Looks Like After a Year of Climate Change Censorship” — which accurately reports how the Trump Administration and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt have changed, skewed or deleted government information from the EPA Website for crass political purposes. For more in-depth analysis of the issue of information scrubbing from federal websites, one should look to the work of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) and especially their reports: “Changing the Digital Climate” and “The EPA Under Siege”.
According to former government officials and EPA staffers, the level of scrutiny is without precedent. In the hands of an administration that has eschewed facts for their alternative cousins, the agency’s site is increasingly unmoored from its scientific core.
“In my experience, new administrations might come in and change the appearance of an agency website or the way they present information, but this is an unprecedented attempt to delete or bury credible scientific information they find politically inconvenient,” Heather Zichal, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center, and previously President Barack Obama’s top White House adviser on energy and climate change, tells TIME.
The EPA’s site is now riddled with missing links, redirecting pages and buried information. Over the past year, terms like “fossil fuels”, “greenhouse gases” and “global warming” have been excised. Even the term “science” is no longer safe.
Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA Administrator under George W. Bush, says the overhaul is “to such an extreme degree that [it] undermines the credibility of the site”…
Of the more than 25,000 web pages tracked by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) since Trump’s election, they say the EPA’s have been hit hardest. One section, which provided local communities with resources for combating climate change, disappeared for months only to resurface heavily redacted, including just 175 of its 380 pages.
via The EPA’s Website After a Year of Climate Change Censorship | Time.
2016 End of Term Web Archive is now available
The 2016 end of term .gov/.mil web crawl is now available! We collected approximately 300TB of government websites which includes over “70 million html pages, over 40 million PDFs and, towards the other end of the spectrum and for semantic web aficionados, 8 files of the text/turtle mime type” as well as @100TB of public data via .gov FTP file servers! Thanks to everyone who participated on the project and the thousands(!) of seed nominators, both individuals and those that came in via DataRefuge and EDGI tools and public events.
The End of Term Web Archive contains federal government websites (.gov, .mil, etc) in the Legislative, Executive, or Judicial branches of the government. Websites that were at risk of changing (i.e., whitehouse.gov) or disappearing altogether during government transitions were captured. Local government websites, or any other site not part of the federal government domain were out of scope.
Lunchtime listen: “Storing Data Together” by Matt Zumwalt at Code4Lib2017
Drop everything and watch this presentation from the 2017 Code4Lib conference that took place in Los Angeles March 6-9, 2017. Heck, watch the entire proceedings because there is a bunch of interesting and thoughtful stuff going on in the world of libraries and technology! But in particular, check out Matt Zumwalt’s presentation “How the distributed web could bring a new Golden Age for Libraries” — after submitting his talk, he changed the new title to “Storing data together: the movement to decentralize data and how libraries can lead it” because of the DataRefuge movement.
Zumwalt (aka @FLyingZumwalt on twitter), works at Protocol Labs, one of the primary developers of IPFS, the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) — grok their tagline “HTTP is obsolete. It’s time for the distributed, permanent web!” He has spent much of his spare time over the last 9 months working with groups like EDGI, DataRefuge, and the Internet Archive to help preserve government datasets.
Here’s what Matt said in a nutshell: The Web is precarious. But using peer-to-peer distributed network architecture, we can “store data together”, we can collaboratively preserve and serve out government data. This resonates with me as an FDLP librarian. What if a network of FDLP libraries actually took this on? This isn’t some far-fetched, scifi idea. The technologies and infrastructures are already there. Over the last 9 months, researchers, faculty and public citizens around the country have already gotten on board with this idea. Libraries just have to get together and agree that it’s a good thing to collect/download, store, describe and serve out government information. Together we can do this!
Matt’s talk starts at 3:07:41 of the YouTube video below. Please watch it, let his ideas sink in, share it, start talking about it with your colleagues and administrators in your library, and get moving. Government information could be the great test case for the distributed web and a new Golden Age for Libraries!
This presentation will show how the worldwide surge of work on distributed technologies like the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) opens the door to a flourishing of community-oriented librarianship in the digital age. The centralized internet, and the rise of cloud services, has forced libraries to act as information silos that compete with other silos to be the place where content and metadata get stored. We will look at how decentralized technologies allow libraries to break this pattern and resume their missions of providing discovery, access and preservation services on top of content that exists in multiple places.
Latest Comments