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UNT Libraries receives grant to investigate collection needs for material archived from government web sites
DENTON (UNT), Texas -- When President Barack Obama took office in January, the contents of many of the 3,200 government agencies' web sites changed almost overnight. However, the University of North Texas Libraries had collaborated with four partner organizations to preserve much of the information contained on the web sites in the 2008-09 End-of-Term Web Archive project. As a result, an approximately 20 terabyte Web archive of government information was created. The archive is replicated on the UNT Libraries' CyberCemetery and on the other organizations' web repositories. The UNT Libraries, which is affiliated with the National Archives and Records Administration, has now received a two-year, $631,720 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to investigate collection development needs related to government information. UNT's partner in the project is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization that was founded to build an Internet library offering access to historical collections that exist in digital format. Cathy Hartman, assistant dean of the UNT Libraries, said the project investigators will attempt to classify the materials captured in the End-of-Term Web Archive using the Superintendent of Documents, or SuDocs, Classification Numbering System, which has been used to organize government information for more than 100 years. The system groups documents by the government agency that published them, instead of by subject as with the Dewey Decimal System. Hartman said that once the web archive content is classified, librarians can select materials for specific collections, which users will be able to search. "Most archives harvest and store web-published materials in a manner for preservation, and not in a manner for information discovery," she said, noting that though the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has existed for years, users must type in the complete URL of a site to access past information on that site. Project investigators will also develop measurable units for the material in Web archives. "Librarians need to be able to describe archived Internet material in units that are comparable to materials in the physical collections," Hartman said. "They need to be able to say, ‘We have material that equates to this many volumes.'" Dr. Kathleen Murray, postdoctoral research associate for the UNT Libraries and project manager, said users of the collections of archived materials, including researchers, lawmakers, policy makers and the general public "will have access to a more comprehensive range of information." Government information specialists from 10 libraries will serve as subject matter experts for the project in the area of collection development for government information. Hartman noted that material harvested from government web sites is managed by technology professionals, who may not have backgrounds on selection perameters for government information collections. "There are more than 1,200 federal depository libraries in the U.S. The proposed classification will enable librarians to select materials consistent with their collection development policies," she said. The UNT Libraries' Government Documents Department, for example, collects materials concerning the environment, "since there is such a broad interest in environmental science on this campus," Hartman said. Murray said those who make decisions about what to archive "will be able to make more informed acquisition decisions for the web-published materials." She called these materials "a rapidly emerging resource type" with "costs and benefits that are difficult to characterize relative to traditional print and electronic materials." If the End-of-Term Web Archive project is successful for government information materials, the tools developed during the project could be investigated for use by information professionals in other disciplines, she said.
UNT News Service Phone Number: (940) 565-2108
Contact: Nancy Kolsti (940) 565-3509
Email: nkolsti@unt.edu
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