This is the public repository for the End of Term Web Archive project. The End of Term Web Archive is a collaborative initiative that collects, preserves, and makes accessible United States Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. Beginning in 2008, the End of Term Web Archive has thus far preserved websites from administration changes in 2008, 2012, 2016 and is currently working to archive content from the 2020 electoral season.
The End of Term Web Archive contains federal government websites (.gov, .mil, government websites not on the .gov domain, government social media accounts, public-nominated government sites, etc.) in the Legislative, Executive, or Judicial branches of the government. Local or state government websites or any other sites not part of the federal government domain are considered out of scope; however, some websites exist in a liminal space that makes "official" federal status hard to determine. The website seed lists published in this repository represent the full extent of the sites selected for archiving.
The project also solicits public nominations of websites to include in the archive. The online nomination tool for 2020 can be found at End of Term 2012 Nomination Tool.
The project has two phases: A broad, comprehensive baseline crawl of identified websites and more selective, focused crawls based on priorities established by the partners.
Comprehensive Crawl - The Internet Archive started a comprehensive crawl of the URLs identified for this project beginning in September 2012. Prioritized Crawl - The project team called upon government information specialists, including librarians, political and social science researchers, and academics to assist in the selection and prioritization of the selected web sites to be included in the collection, as well as identifying the frequency and depth of collecting. These human nominated seeds were harvested throughout the project to make sure that they are represented in the project.
- The End of Term Web Archive portal provides access to archived sites collected as part of the project.
- The online nomination tool for 2020 can be found at End of Term 2020 Nomination Tool.
- 2016-12-02: "After the Harvest: Preservation, Access, and Researcher Services for the 2016 End of Term Archive" at CNI Fall 2016 Meeting.
- 2016-07-17: "Harvesting Democracy: Archiving Federal Government Web Content at End of Term" at American Association of Law Libraries 2016 Conference.
- 2016-06-22: "Exploratory Analysis of the End of Term Web Archive: Comparing Two Collections" at Web Archiving and Digital Libraries 2016.
- 2013-02-01: "Classification of the End of Term Archive: Extending Collection Development Practices to Web Archives" [IMLS Final Project Report for Award LG-06-09-0174-09] (https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded/lg-06-09-0174-09).
- Join the End of Term listserv.
- Follow the End of Term Twitter account.