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Nominations Sought for the U.S. Federal Government End of Term Web Archive

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Photos: TOP: January 21, 2013, Fifty-Seventh Inaugural Ceremonies, President Barack H. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Photo from U.S. Senate Photo Studio. BOTTOM: January 20, 2005, Fifty-Fifth Inaugural Ceremonies, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Photo from Architect of the Capitol.
TOP: January 21, 2013, Fifty-Seventh Inaugural Ceremonies, President Barack H. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.Photo from U.S. Senate Photo Studio.
BOTTOM: January 20, 2005, Fifty-Fifth Inaugural Ceremonies, President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Photo from Architect of the Capitol.

This is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, lead information technology specialist of the Library of Congress Web Archiving Team

Readers of The Signal may recall prior efforts to archive United States Federal Government websites during the end of presidential terms. I last wrote about this in 2012 when we were working on preserving the government domain during the end of President Obama’s first term. To see the results of our 2008 and 2012 efforts, visit the End of Term Archive.

As the Obama administration comes to a close, the End of Term project team has formed again and we need help from you.

For the End of Term 2016 archive, the Library of Congress, California Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries, Internet Archive, George Washington University Libraries, Stanford University Libraries and the U.S. Government Publishing Office have joined together for a collaborative project to preserve public United States Government websites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 20, 2017. Partners are joining together to select, collect, preserve, and make the web archives available for research use.

This web harvest — like its predecessors in 2008 and 2012 — is intended to document the federal government’s presence on the web during the transition of Presidential administrations and to enhance the existing collections of the partner institutions. This broad comprehensive crawl of the .gov domain will include as many federal .gov sites as we can find, plus federal content in other domains (such as .mil, .com and social media content).

And that’s where you come in. You can help the project immensely by nominating your favorite .gov website, other federal government websites or governmental social media account with the End of Term Nomination Tool. Please nominate as many sites as you want. Nominate early and often. Tell your friends, family and colleagues to do the same. Help us preserve the .gov domain for posterity, public access and long-term preservation.

Comments (3)

  1. Thanks for the nomination, Eric! I’ll and add it to our list. Other nominations can be input via the form here: http://digital2.library.unt.edu/nomination/eth2016/ (and you can also check what URLs have already been nominated there).

  2. Please crawl all of the NIH 27 agencies and include the Centers. We need to document the NIH’s role in biomedicine. I have a crawl set up but it has blocked several sites and now our small office does not the resources to crawl in depth our site. Thank you.

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