Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s resignation announcement earlier this month and the transition of power to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell gave the Alaska State Library a great chance to preserve this "at risk" content. 

Using Archive-It and the manual "start on demand" feature inside the web application  the Alaska State Library crawled Governor Palin and Lt. Governor Parnell's web sites on the eve of the transition of power and was 
able to capture valuable information that is now offline and no longer accessible.

The Alaska State Library’s Alaska Governor/Lt. Governor Web Sites collection was originally conceived to archive these government websites over time.  Once Sarah Palin left office, the governor’s website changed to reflect Sean Parnell as governor, and the lieutenant governor’s
website changed to reflect Craig Campbell as lieutenant governor. Thus all of the information on former Governor Palin’s website as well as speeches and press releases from Sean Parnell’s time as lieutenant governor are no longer available on the live web. 

The foresight of the staff of the Alaska State Library and the availability of the Archive-It web archiving service made it possible to preserve the final changes to these "at risk" websites before they were taken offline.

The Library of Congress announced via their Twitter account, that:

LOC will capture tweets on #sotomayor for its web archives on the Sotomayor nomination. http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/

Here is a list of some of the latest web capture projects they are working on:

Supreme Court Nominations 2009

The Supreme Court Nominations 2009 Web Archive will be a selective collection of Web sites archived between June 2009 through the completion of the hearings process. Web sites collected will include materials produced by watchdog, public policy, and political advocacy groups, blogs and tweets, community and religious organizations, foreign and domestic news sources, educational and research institutions, and independent websites.
Collection dates: June 2009 through confirmation hearings.

Indian General Elections

The Library's Delhi Overseas Operations Office is documenting the ongoing process of India general election in 2009.

Presidential Transition During a Time of Crises Web Archive

Presidential Transition During a Time of Crises Web Archive will be a selective collection of Web sites archived between January 2009 and June 2009. Web sites collected will include materials produced by domestic and foreign political groups, community and religious organizations, advocacy groups, foreign and domestic news sources, and independent websites.
Collection dates: January 2009 - June 2009. The collection will be evaluated prior to completion and may be extended.

I would suggest they start archiving the tweets about the #iranelection (see earlier blog post) by James R. Jacobs.

As the inauguration ceremony begins tomorrow, we can be assured that the Library of Congress and other partners in the End of Term Harvest project have captured much of the Bush administration's online presence. Many of these websites will be re-captured at later dates, providing an interesting look at how these websites will change over time, through different administrations.

On a related note, there will undoubtedly be changes in the coming days, weeks, months, that will eliminate some government agencies. We are trying to archive as many of these "dead" websites as possible in the CyberCemetery, to preserve them in their final form.

Please, if you know of a website that is disappearing, email or call me. I'm keeping my eyes and ears open, but there is a lot of content out there, and I welcome your help. After all, this information is for all of us!

Thanks, and I wish you all joy as we witness history tomorrow.

Starting on January 5, 2009, the Department of Labor (DOL) archived all DOL agency Web sites as they existed at that time.

• DOL Web Site Archive
• Labor Department launches digital snapshot project, By Wyatt Kash, Government Computer News, Jan 15, 2009.

According to the GCN article, the Department was concerned that, in the Library of Congress project to crawl and harvest agency web sites at the end of the Bush administration, the Department had no control over what would be archived and when and there will be limitations on what gets preserved and the searchability of those pages. The Department's snapshot will give it control over dates and areas on the site preserved and will allow users to search for key words and text.

The department estimates that it has roughly 1.6 million pages of information. With a service agreement with the Internet Archive, the department will be able to archive up to 5 million Web pages and related documents over the course of a year.

The Internet Archive is also working separately with the Energy Department, the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine.

Valerie Glenn, University of Alabama Libraries nee University of North Texas, has an article out in the current First Monday entitled, "Preserving Government and Political Information: The Web–at–Risk Project" that talks about ... wait for it ... Web harvesting!

It's based on her talk at 2007 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World. In fact the whole issue of First Monday 12(7) is dedicated to selected papers from the WebWise. Valerie's article the what and why of Web harvesting, gives some sample collections, tools, and services and talks a little about some of the overarching issues involved in Web harvesting. There's more information on the Web-at-risk wiki.

Besides Valerie's article, there are podcasts of all of the sessions from WebWise07 where you'll hear the likes of Liz Bishoff, Günter Waibel, Steve Puglia, Deanna B. Marcum etc.

And if you haven't heard of First Monday you owe it to yourself to get over to that link and check out all their past issues. Or look at Best Mondays, their most read -- or at least most accessed -- articles.

Last year we posted a note on ResourceShelf about the “2004 Presidential Term Web Harvest” containing more than 75 million .Gov and .Mil web pages, equal to about 6.5 terabytes of data. It's a project of NARA and The Internet Archive. The archived sites can be browsed or keyword searched.

Now available is the 109th Web Harvest.
What does it contain?
+ More than four million pages (42 GB) crawled and archived between 11/11/06 and 12/11/06
+ Browse by Members Name
+ Browse by Committee Name
+ Browse by Leadership
+ Browse by House or Senate Organizations

Go to: http://www.webharvest.gov/collections/

The harvest produced a public reference copy of the web sites for the purpose of continual availability to the public, and also produced a record copy to be retained in the holdings of NARA…Web sites included in the harvest were identified from information provided by the Web Systems Branch of the House Information Resources staff and by Senate webmasters in the Offices of the Secretary of the Senate and the Sergeant at Arms.

A bit more on ResourceShelf including a comment by Librarian of Congress, James Billington, about the average lifespan of a web site.