The Library of Congress preserves the nation's cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The Library's traditional functions of acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and the American people to foster education and scholarship extend to digital materials, including Web sites.

In 2000, the Library of Congress established a pilot project to collect and preserve these primary source materials. A multidisciplinary team of Library staff representing cataloging, legal, public services, and technology services studied methods to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve these materials for future generations of researchers. The Library developed thematic Web archives on such topics as the United States National Elections of 2000, 2002, and 2004, the Iraq War, and the events of September 11. More about these collections can be found at the Library of Congress Web Archives Web site.

In July 2003, the Library and the national libraries of Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the British Library (UK), and the Internet Archive (USA) acknowledged the importance of international collaboration for preserving Internet content for future generations and formed the International Internet Preservation Consortium. The goals of the Consortium include collecting a rich body of Internet content from around the world and fostering the development and use of common tools, techniques and standards that enable the creation of international archives.

In 2004, the Library’s Office of Strategic Initiatives created a Web Capture team to support the goal of managing and sustaining at-risk digital content. The team is charged with building a Library-wide understanding and technical infrastructure for capturing Web content. The team, in collaboration with a variety of Library staff, and national and international partners, is identifying policy issues, establishing best practices and building tools to collect and preserve Web content.

The team has completed 17 Web archive collections and is working on building Web archives for four collections comprising approximately 3000 Web sites.