Web Archiving Local Election and Government Websites

Abstract

L ocal election and political websites are highly ephemeral due to their nature, especially for losing candidates. Thus, they are highly vulnerable to loss from the historical record. A survey during Spring 2019 of previously captured web archives on the Archive.org website showed a scarcity of captured websites for local governmental and political elections in Michigan. The University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library currently captures websites related to the Governor, Michigan senators, and some congress members. However, less high-profile candidates were not being captured. As such, many websites from the 2018 midterm elections are vulnerable to loss. Furthermore, 2020 held a presidential election as well as many local elections, and with these campaigns, political websites hosting valuable candidate information were put up on the web for a limited time. Preserving content from these websites could be of great value for future researchers. This project, funded by a microgrant provided by the Michigan State University (MSU) Libraries, explored the capture and curation of local political and election websites using an existing Archive-It (https://archive-it.org/) subscription. For this project, we had a commitment to both internal and external collaboration. We collaborated in the early site identification with the Library of Michigan staff to coordinate collection development. Internally, we also hosted a focus group consisting of faculty, graduate students, and local government administrators to help define our target areas. The Internet Archive defines web archiving as “a series of steps that work together for an end goal: to interact with a website as it looked on the day that it was archived.”1 The process of web archiving can be a time-consuming endeavor depending on the complexity of the website, such as the inclusion of embedded content like PDFs and videos, as well as other factors such as if the site was built using website development services such as Wix, which uses customized themes and captures are often incomplete or embedded content does not replay. Typically, web archiving is conducted by librarians and archivists. However, as the nature of web archiving is time-consuming, in order to alleviate some of this strain on professional staff we explored the use of a non-librarian/archivist to conduct and verify the technical aspects of web capturing under staff supervision.