archiving and preserving born digital government documents

Gone Today, Here Tomorrow: Archiving and Preserving Born

Digital Government Documents

Molly Bragg,

Partner Specialist

Internet Archive

mbragg@archive.org

Federal Depository Library Conference

Arlington, Virginia

October 20, 2008

Internet Archive

• Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle• Largest public web archive in existence• Designated as a library by the state of

California in 2007• Digitized collections of books, audio,

moving images• www.archive.org

Partner Needs for Web Capture

• Libraries and Archives need web capture beyond general web archive

• Partners need to create focused collections

• Harvest at specific frequencies

• Reporting Features

• Hosting, Access and full text search

Archiving Big and Small

• Domain crawls for the most comprehensive collections, ex .fr, .au

• Curated crawls for large collections, Iraq war, Election Collections

• Archive-It service, for smaller sized collections (automated harvesting)

Archiving the U.S. Federal Government

Library of Congress• Congressional Harvests (107th – 110th)

NARA• End of Presidental term (2004)• Congressional Election Harvest (2006, 2008)

End of Term 2008 harvest • Collaborative project (LoC, CDL, UNT, GPO)

www.loc.gov/minerva/

www.webharvest.gov

Archive-It

• Subscription service for smaller collection needs• Includes collection management, harvesting, full

text search, hosting and access• Collections publicly available at www.archive-it.org• Over 65 partners (State Archive/Libraries,

Universities, Federal institutions, Museums, Public Libraries)

Archiving with Archive-It

• Publications in born digital formats only• Web archiving allows archivist to capture

more than just the publications• At risk content needs to be preserved

before it is lost• Supplement paper collections• Builds relationships between

archives/libraries and government agencies

Federal Institutions and Archive-It

• National Institutes of Health: capture select NIH websites and records

• Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information: archiving the E-Print Network, a web-based library of published papers, research groups, and electronic documents.

• Department of Labor: create an archive of their web presence.

US State Government:North Carolina

• State Library / State Archive partnership• 1 main collection for all state agencies• Websites for the collection are selected using

specific appraisal guidelines• Provide special access portal for the web

archives from their own site to brand and market the collection

http://www.archives.ncdcr.gov/webarchives/index.html

Local Web Archiving

• San Francisco Public Library, Government Information Center

• Archiving San Francisco city agencies with Archive-It

• Digitizing San Francisco municipal reports: http://www.archive.org/details/sfpl

Global web archiving: Latin America

• Latin American Network Information Center, at the University of Texas, Austin

• Archive ministry, elected official websites for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean

• Comprehensive coverage of Latin American government information

http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/archives/lagda/

Global Web Archiving: Asia, Pacific Region

• National Library of Australia• Thailand, Laos, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Burma

/ Myanmar and Cambodia• Election coverage, spontaneous events and

government websites• Example collections:

-Lao PDR Government and NGO Websites

-Post Thaksin politics in Thailand

-Cambodian National Election 2008

-Burmese Uprising 2007

Contact Information

Molly Bragg

Partner Specialist

mbragg@archive.org

415.561.6799 ext 6

http://www.slideshare.net/event/dlcfall08