Web Preservation Projects at Library of Congress
Abigail Grotke, Library of Congress, USA
Gina Jones, Library of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/minerva/

Session: Managing Content

The Library of Congress' mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.

An ever-increasing amount of the world's cultural and intellectual output is presently created in digital formats and does not exist in any physical form. Such materials are colloquially described as "born digital." This born digital realm includes open access materials on the World Wide Web.

The MINERVA Web Preservation Project was established to initiate a broad program to collect and preserve these primary source materials. A multi disciplinary team of Library staff representing cataloging, legal, public services, and technology services is studying methods to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve these materials for future generations of researchers.

This paper will provide a report on the Library of Congress Web harvesting activities, describing experiences to date selecting, capturing, and providing access to topic-based collections, including U.S. Presidential Candidate Election 2000, September 11, 2001, the 2002 Olympics, and the 2002 Election.