This is a guest blog post by Abbie Grotke, Assistant Head, Digital Content Management Section

Washington, D.C. – Crowd in front of Capitol – Cleveland’s 2nd inauguration. Washington D.C, 1893. Photograph. //www.loc.gov/item/00650948/.

You may have noticed that it is presidential election season in the United States, which means it’s also time for web archivists to gather once again to archive United States Federal Government websites during the end of the presidential term. Since 2008, the Library of Congress has participated in a collaborative project to document changes in government websites from one term to the next.

To see the results of our 2008, 2012, and 2016 efforts, and to learn more about what we’re doing in 2020, visit https://end-of-term.github.io/eotarchive/ and follow us on Twitter @eotarchive.

While the project team has access to a number of bulk lists of government domains that help create the list of URLs that we will archive, the public is invited (and encouraged!) to identify priority content by nominating specific URLs, whether they are websites, documents, or datasets. Crawlers don’t always archive as deeply down into a website as you might imagine, so even if we know about a particular domain of a government website, it is still important for you to let us know about specific pages or documents so we don’t miss them. Any federal government websites, including governmental social media accounts, are within scope for the collection. Election-related content such as campaign websites or news websites discussing the election and end of term are out of scope for this project.

Do you know of content that we should be sure to archive? Please submit your URLs here: https://digital2.library.unt.edu/nomination/eth2020/. The first crawls began in early October, but we’ll continue to crawl through, and just after, Inauguration Day in 2021.

Help us preserve the .gov domain for posterity, public access, and long-term preservation. Only YOU can help prevent…link rot!