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A New Interface and New Web Archive Content at Loc.gov

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The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Lead Information Technology Specialist on the Web Archiving Team, Library of Congress.

Archived version of a Member of Congress Official Web Site - Barack Obama
Archived version of a Member of Congress Official Web Site – Barack Obama

Recently the Library of Congress launched a significant amount of new Web Archive content on the Library’s Web site, as a part of a continued effort to integrate the Library’s Web Archives into the rest of the loc.gov web presence.

This is our first big release since we launched the first iteration of collections into this new interface, back in June 2013. The earlier approach to presenting archived web sites turned out to be a challenge to allow us to increase the amount of content available, so in a “one step back, two steps forward” move, the interface has been simplified, and should be more familiar to those working with Web Archives at other institutions – item records point to archived web sites displaying in an open-source version of the Wayback Machine. This simplification allowed the Library to increase the number of sites available in this interface from just under 1,000 to over 5,800. The most recent harvested sites now publicly available were harvested in March-April 2012. The simplified approach should also allow catching up with moving more current content into the online collections.

There are now 21 named collections available in the new interface; some had been available in our old interface but are newly migrated; other content is entirely new. With this launch, we are particularly excited about the addition of the United States Congressional Web Archives, which for the first time allows researchers to access content collected since December 2002 up thru April 2012. Each record covers those sessions where a particular member of Congress was serving, such as for Barack Obama as senator during two sessions, or the example of Kirsten E. Gillibrand serving in the House and Senate, represented on one record despite a URL change.

Other newly available collections include the Burma/Myanmar General Election 2010 Web Archive, Egypt 2008 Web Archive, Laotian General Election 2011 Web Archive, Thai General Election 2011 Web Archive, Vietnamese General Election 2011 Web Archive and the Winter Olympic Games 2002 Web Archive.

We still have some work to do to move the U.S. Election Web Archives from our old interface, so for the time being researchers interested in those collections will need to refer back to the old site. Eventually we will be combining the separate Election collections into one U.S. Election Archive that will allow better searchability and access, and migrating them over (and then “turning off” the old interface).

We hope researchers will enjoy access to these new web archive collections.

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