The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) is administered by the Government Printing Office (GPO) and web archiving is one of 11 active FDLP projects.
The actual web crawling, capture, and archiving is conducted by Archive-It, a fee-based service from the Internet Archive and a resource we mention regularly on infoDOCKET. FDLP began partnering with Archive-It during November 2011.
From the Web Archiving Project Info Page:
The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) Web Archive is comprised of selected U.S. Government Web sites, harvested and archived in their entirety by the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) in order to create working “snapshots” of the Web sites at various points in time. The aim is to provide permanent public access to Federal Agency Web content. GPO harvests and archives the Web sites with Archive-It, a subscription-based Web harvesting and archiving service offered by the Internet Archive.
How to Access Archived Web Sites
Catalog of U.S. Government Publications
Bibliographic records for the archived Web sites, which describe the sites and link to them via PURL (Persistent URL), are searchable and accessible through the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP).
To limit your search to only FDLP Web Archive records, use the expert search function and search wcat=web archiving
Archive-It Website
The archived Web sites can also be searched and accessed through the FDLP Web Archive Collection page on the Archive-It Web site.
The page includes an FAQ that presently has 21 questions (and answers) including:
- Why is GPO archiving Federal Web sites?
- How does Web archiving with Archive-It work?
- What Federal Web sites is GPO archiving?
- Are there any Federal Web sites GPO will not archive?
- Can I recommend a Federal Web site to be archived?
- How can FDLP libraries obtain the bibliographic records in MARC format for the Web sites in the FDLP Web Archive?
- Why are records for the FDLP Web Archive cataloged
At the bottom of the page you’ll find direct links to view two archived webinars about the project titled:
- Bringing Order to Chaos: Capturing and Preserving the Federal Web for Permanent Public Access
- Archiving & Cataloging Federal Agency Web Sites- GPO’s Web Archiving Project
Direct to FDLP Web Archiving Project Info Page
See Also: Get to Know the Harvesting Pilot Project Team (via FDLP Connections; March 2013)
See Also: Criteria And Parameters For GPO’s Web Harvesting Pilot Project
See Also: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Web Publication Harvesting Pilot Project; October 2012)
Note: You can access and search nearly 2400publicly accessible web archive collections from various organizations on this Archive-It page. Also, unlike The Wayback Machine (another service of the Internet Archive) Archive-It collections are keyword searchable.
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