Would Like to Archive Government Web Services, not just Web Sites– Please help

[mostakimvip04]

Archiving .gov and .mil websites is going on now, with lots of help—but what if we could archive full government web services? This would mean keeping interactive sites that include databases and forms, available for future use even if the original website changes or is removed.

We like this idea because we would preserve how websites telemarketing data worked, not just what they looked like. As websites become more database driven and interactive, this would be a bigger help than the already helpful Wayback Machine.

We believe this is possible now given the increased use of virtual machines and cloud services. Webmasters are adjusting to having their systems work in an isolated environment and one that can be snapshot’d.

What we need are some webmasters who would like to try this. We think that government websites would be perfect because they tend to change as administrations change and the datasets are often public data.

If you run a website and would like to participate in this experiment or would like to help on the receiving end, please send a note to org or reply to this post.

Archiving web services could usher in a completely new age in archiving of Internet resources.

Over the past extremely unpredictable election year, the Internet Archive invented new methods and tools to give journalists, researchers, and the public the power to access, scrutinize, share, and thoroughly fact-check political ads, presidential debates, and TV news broadcasts.

Our efforts were designed to help citizens better understand the patterns of political messages designed to persuade them and find factual, reliable information in what is disturbingly being seen as a “post-truth” world.

The Political TV Ad Archive project proved to be highly useful to our high-profile fact-checking partners, as well as reporters at an array of outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, FOX News, The Economist, The Atlantic, and more. By providing data about when, where, and how many times political ads aired on TV in key markets, the project unlocked new creative potential for data reporters to analyze how campaigns and outside groups were targeting messages to voters in different locations.

Breaking events, like political debates and speeches, also offered a chance for archived TV content to shine, allowing reporters to isolate and share clips in near-real time, and fact-checkers to harvest dubious statements for further exploration. In addition, the project’s experience with developing audio fingerprinting (through a new invention we call the Duplitron) for identifying instances of ads inspired a new use: tracking candidate debate sound bites in subsequent TV news shows.

In this way, reporters and researchers were able to analyze and report on which political statements were trending across different TV programs. This provided a way to show how political statements were trending across various networks, revealing the ideological, and agenda-setting and other editorial choices made by news producers about what issues to highlight and overlook.