Long before the 2016 Presidential election cycle librarians have understood this often-overlooked fact: vast amounts of government data and digital information are at risk of vanishing when a presidential term ends and administrations change. For example, 83% of .gov pdf’s disappeared between 2008 and 2012.
That is why the Internet Archive, along with partners from the Library of Congress, University of North Texas, George Washington University, Stanford University, California Digital Library, and buy sales lead other public and private libraries, are hard at work on the End of Term Web Archive, a wide-ranging effort to preserve the entirety of the federal government web presence, especially the .gov and .mil domains, along with federal websites on other domains and official government social media accounts.
While not the only project the Internet Archive is doing to preserve government websites, ftp sites, and databases at this time, the End of Term Web Archive is a far reaching one.
The Internet Archive is collecting webpages from over 6,000 government domains, over 200,000 hosts, and feeds from around 10,000 official federal social media accounts. The effort is likely to preserve hundreds of millions of individual government webpages and data and could end up totaling well over 100 terabytes of data of archived materials. Over its full history of web archiving, the Internet Archive has preserved over 3.5 billion URLs from the .gov domain including over 45 million PDFs.