End of Term Web Archive

The End of Term Web Archive preserves U.S. federal government websites during administration changes.^[1]

End of Term Web Archive (EOTArchive)
A version of this USGS map was archived by project partner UNT in the 2008 End of Term collection.
Mission statement	"The End of Term Web Archive captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations."
Commercial?	No
Type of project	Collaborative government web archive
Established	2008
Website	eotarchive.org

Background

The End of Term Web Archive was set up following a 2008 announcement from National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) that they would not be archiving government websites during transition, after carrying out such crawls in 2000 and 2004.^[2] The 2004 federal web harvest can be accessed alongside congressional web harvests, beginning with the 109th United States Congress, at National Archives.^[3]

The first project partners were the Library of Congress, George Washington University, Stanford University, University of North Texas, the US Government Publishing Office, California Digital Library and the Internet Archive, all members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. The project was initially sketched out after a General Assembly of the IIPC in 2008.^[4] NARA and the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) joined the 2020/21 project.^[5]

The project

 

Custom error page used to direct whitehouse.gov visitors as the website changed in 2009.

The project archives websites and documents for public access and research use.^[6] A UNT study into the risk to document files found that 83% of PDFs on the .gov domain in 2008 were missing four years later.^[7] This is consistent with the requirement to manage websites, but their status means that changes may be of interest to the public and watchdog groups.^[8] Evidence of the demand for continued access to historical web material can be found in an announcement made by the EPA in response to concerns about changes in 2017, stating that pages from the previous administration would be carefully archived.^[9] These snapshot pages were clearly marked to distinguish them from contemporary content.^[10]

The archive prioritizes sites administering areas regarded as likely to be updated or removed over the period of transition.^[11] The public are encouraged to nominate important sites and these are combined with broad crawls of government domains to create the collection.^[12][13] Although it is extensive - the 2016 crawl preserved 11,382 sites - it stops short of being comprehensive.^[14][15] Researchers have used these collections to examine the history of climate change policy and reuse of suspended U.S. government Twitter accounts.^[16][17]

See also

• International Internet Preservation Consortium
• Web Archiving Initiatives

References

1. Dwyer, Jim (2016-12-02). "Harvesting Government History, One Web Page at a Time (Published 2016)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. from the original on 18 Jan 2020. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
2. Webster, Peter (2017). Brügger, Niels (ed.). . Web 25. Histories from 25 Years of the World Wide Web: 179–190. doi:10.3726/b11492. hdl:2318/1770557. ISBN 9781433140655. Archived from the original on 2020-10-21.
3. "National Archives". Congressional & Federal Government Web Harvests. Archived from the original on 2017-09-18. Retrieved 2021-01-18.
4. Seneca, Tracy; Grotke, Abbie; Hartman, Cathy Nelson; Carpenter, Kris (2012). (PDF). DTTP: Documents to the People. 40: 16. ISSN 0091-2085. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-08.
5. "GitHub - end-of-term/eot2020". GitHub. from the original on 2020-12-05. Retrieved 2020-12-14.
6. "End of Term Web Archive: U.S. Government Websites". 2020-12-06. from the original on 2020-12-06. Retrieved 2020-12-15.
7. Gilmore, Courtney (4 Dec 2020). "UNT Part of Team Archiving Obama Administration Web Content". NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth. from the original on 7 Dec 2020. Retrieved 2020-12-04.
8. "Website Monitoring". Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. from the original on 2020-12-06. Retrieved 2021-02-24.
9. Mooney, Chris; Eilperin, Juliet. "EPA website removes climate science site from public view after two decades". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. from the original on 2017-04-29. Retrieved 2021-02-18.
10. . 2017-04-29. Archived from the original on 2017-04-29. Retrieved 2021-04-08.
11. "Guerrilla Archiving". The Politics of Evidence. 2016-12-05. from the original on 4 Aug 2020. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
12. Jacobs, James R. (2020-08-10). "Nominations sought for the U.S. Federal Government Domain End of Term 2020 Web Archive". Free Government Information (FGI). from the original on 4 Oct 2020. Retrieved 2020-12-07.
13. "End of Term Archive on Twitter: "And so it begins. We have officially started crawling the websites nominated for the End of Term 2020 web archive! But don't worry, you still have time to nominate more! What are your favorite government sites? #WebArchiveWednesday #WebArchives #GovDocs"". 2020-10-07. from the original on 7 Oct 2020. Retrieved 2020-11-06.
14. O'Keefe, Ed (2015-10-08). "How many .gov sites exist? Thousands. - The Washington Post". The Washington Post. from the original on 8 Oct 2015. Retrieved 2020-12-04.
15. Young, Lauren J. "The Librarians Saving The Internet". Science Friday. from the original on 9 Nov 2020. Retrieved 2020-12-04.
16. EDGI, Toly Rinberg, Maya Anjur-Dietrich, Marcy Beck, Andrew Bergman, Justin Derry, Lindsey Dillon, Gretchen Gehrke, Rebecca Lave, Chris Sellers, Nick Shapiro, Anastasia Aizman, Dan Allan, Madelaine Britt, Raymond Cha, Janak Chadha, Morgan Currie, Sara Johns, Abby Klionsky, Stephanie Knutson, Katherine Kulik, Aaron Lemelin, Kevin Nguyen, Eric Nost, Kendra Ouellette, Lindsay Poirier, Sara Rubinow, Justin Schell, Lizz Ultee, Julia Upfal, Tyler Wedrosky, Jacob Wylie. "Changing the Digital Climate". 100days.envirodatagov.org. Archived from the original on 2018-04-04. Retrieved 2021-01-14.
17. Littman, Justin (2017-11-04). "Suspended U.S. government Twitter accounts". Social Feed Manager. from the original on 2017-11-07. Retrieved 2020-12-07.