Contribute Nominations to the End of Term Web Archive 2012

End of Term 2012 Call for Volunteers


We need your help!


Is a U.S. Government website or part of a site you use or know about at risk of disappearing? Are you a government document or subject expert, or otherwise interested in helping identify U.S. Federal Government websites for collection and preservation? We need your help!

About


In 2008, the Internet Archive, Library of Congress, California Digital Library, University of North Texas Libraries, and the U.S. Government Printing Office, all members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (http://www.netpreserve.org/) and partners in the National Digital Infrastructure and Preservation Program (http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/), agreed to join forces to collaboratively archive the U.S. Government web at the end of the Bush administration. The goal of the “End of Term Web Archive” project team was to execute a comprehensive harvest of the Federal Government domains (.gov, .mil, .org, etc.) in the final months of the Bush administration, and to document changes in the federal government websites as agencies transitioned to the Obama administration. The archive includes Federal Government websites in the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of government. The 2008-2009 archive is available at http://eotarchive.cdlib.org/.

The End of Term project team has resumed for an End of Term 2012-2013 archive, and we need help to identify 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 USA.gov and http://www.uscourts.gov/, however these lists are often not comprehensive.

Nominations of any U.S. Federal government domains 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.)

You may contribute as much time and effort as you are able, whether it be a nomination of 1 website or 500 websites. Websites recommended by volunteers will be prioritized for more frequent and in-depth collection during the course of the project.

Nominating URLs


To contribute a URL to this project, please visit http://digital2.library.unt.edu/nomination/eth2012/ and start entering URLs. Volunteers are asked to submit some simple metadata about the site that they are nominating, and provide some information about themselves.

Contact us at eotproject@loc.gov for further information, or follow us on Twitter @eotarchive

Project Timeframe


2012

*Summer 2012: Recruitment of curators/nominators to help identify websites for prioritized crawling.

*August 2012: Bookend (baseline) crawl of government web domains begins.

*Summer/Fall 2012: Partners will crawl various aspects of government domains at varying frequencies, depending on selection polices/interests. Team will determine strategy for crawling prioritized websites.

*November – February 2012-13: Crawl of prioritized websites.

2013

*January 2013: Depending on the outcome of the election, focused crawls will be conducted as needed during this period.

*Spring or Summer 2013: Bookend crawl, plus additional crawl of prioritized websites as determined by team.

Any questions? Contact the project team at eotproject@loc.gov or on Twitter @eotarchive. Thanks for your participation!