June 16, 2017

Government information preservation is in everyone’s best interest. With the lack of standard funding for website preservation of .gov and .mil websites, a volunteer effort (a grassroots effort if you will) began in 2008 among the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, and tech-savvy librarians at a couple major universities. Every four years, this small but mighty group banded together to pull, harvest and preserve webpage content before a new administration could change or remove the content. The 2016 End of Term web preservation effort saw exponential increases in volunteer support, including additional groups motivated to create nominate-a-thons or save-a-thon events to help find urls and copy the data into Internet Archive servers. This presentation will discuss the current status of public access to prior years of government web pages, the University of San Diego’s Save-a-thon as a case study of legislative advocacy at the law school, and what future efforts we can do as law librarians.