Today’s guest post is from Abbie Grotke, Head of the Web Archiving Section.
If you look back in The Signal archives, you’ll see that we post every four years about a collaborative project that the Library of Congress is involved in to archive United States government websites during the end of presidential terms. This project, called the “End of Term Web Archive,” has kicked off again as election season is underway. Web archivists from across the country are working together and plan to start the archiving process in a few months—and we could use your help.
The Library of Congress already actively collects many federal government websites, and staff from the Web Archiving Program and Serial and Government Publications Division are contributing a list of URLs to the project. Our list will be combined with other bulk lists of .gov domains to create “seed lists” that will guide the web crawler to where we want to capture content. This will be a good starting point for collection, but we also need the public’s help to identify content we might have missed.
If you would like to participate in this project, the nomination forms are now open! The End of Term project team is accepting nominations for content that is of interest to YOU—we are asking government information specialists, librarians, political and social science researchers, academics, students, and the general public to assist in the selection and prioritization of content to be included in the archive.
We welcome recommendations for anything that counts as a U.S. federal government website in the legislative, executive, or judicial branches of government, as well as associated social media accounts. Also in scope are federal government websites on other domains such as .mil, .edu, and .com. We are especially interested in prioritizing websites that could change dramatically or disappear at the end of this presidential term. Out of scope are local or state government websites, non-government websites (including those documenting the election), and news websites about the government. Please be mindful of these guidelines as you are making nominations.
To learn more about the project, you can read blog posts from two of our collaborators, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Internet Archive. Researchers can also access and download bulk data from our prior archiving activities here.
To see United States government content in the Library of Congress web archives, start with a visit to the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room website.