The Federal Web Archiving Interest Group focuses on sharing strategies, workflows, and best practices for collecting, preserving, and providing access to archived web content of interest to U.S. federal agencies. As needed, smaller working groups may form to advance joint projects.
Purpose
The main goal for this interest group is to provide a space for discussing current and future projects, collaboration, and mutual support of web archiving efforts across the federal government and to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort.
History
The interest group began as a collaborative effort of U.S. Federal government agencies to research, develop, and promote common technical guidelines, methods, and best practices for the discovery, access, and preservation of web-disseminated Federal government information. This group originated in September 2014, when the Library of Congress, the U.S. Government Publishing Office and the National Archives and Record Administration, sought to distinguish what and how each agency was preserving web content. Since then, the group has grown to include a number of other agencies and expanded its goals to further its outreach to other agencies to learn what they are doing in the realm of web archiving. In 2019, the group decided that shifting from a working group to an interest group would be better to accommodate the needs of the participating agencies.
Scope
The scope of the interest group is broadly focused on any topic related to web archiving, including the technical challenges of collection/acquisition; processes for selecting and reviewing captured content, metadata in web archive records, the practical experience using specific web archiving tools and services, and broadening access and awareness of the web archiving work of federal agencies.
Participants:
Federal Participants
Representatives of United States government agencies involved in harvesting and archiving web-disseminated information may participate.
Founding and Current Federal Agency Members
Non-federal Expert Participants
Web technology is continually evolving. To assist the working group in developing best practices and guidance documentation, corporate, academic, and other non-federal government experts may be engaged as required and as resources permit.
Meetings
Join Us: If you are a staff member of a Federal Agency who is involved in or interested in web archiving, send an email to FEDGOVWEBARCH-subscribe-request@listserv.gsa.gov (no need to include anything in subject or body, as both fields will be discarded) to subscribe to the listserv.