2012 End of Term Web Archive: Call for Volunteers

July 9, 2012 by
Filed under: post 

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 [email protected], 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

Comments

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!





  • Our mission

    Free Government Information (FGI) is a place for initiating dialogue and building consensus among the various players (libraries, government agencies, non-profit organizations, researchers, journalists, etc.) who have a stake in the preservation of and perpetual free access to government information. FGI promotes free government information through collaboration, education, advocacy and research.
  • Archives

%d bloggers like this:
http://freegovinfo.info/node/3739
freegovinfo.info
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-13
80405
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:HAYMCQAL6VO36LVE2UF5L33VOWX2KHH7
<urn:uuid:03089de4-29b6-4668-8529-3116185dc096>
2017-03-23T20:24:16Z
104.28.18.38
sha1:5DP73AUYV54A4GQZBAEUWEZTX3BGSAPD
<urn:uuid:849e23d2-262b-4b63-82a5-2df3c85b554b>
http://freegovinfo.info/node/3739
length
response
<urn:uuid:bf3aa5a1-9fa0-48c4-9441-91f72e5a4442>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-233-31-227.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-13
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for March 2017
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf