The North Carolina State Government Website Archives: A case study of an American government Web archiving project.

The North Carolina State Archives and State Library of North Carolina collaborated to develop the North Carolina State Government Website Archives, a collection of captured government websites dating back to the fall of 2005 and available to the public for research. This paper explores the process by which the Web archives were developed - from the methodology of how to collect information on the Web through the selection process for determining material to be included in the Web archives and the choice of Archive-It, a service available through the Internet Archive, as the technology for running the Web archives. Challenges in the development and deployment of the Web archives are discussed, including controlling the growth of material captured, the capture of unwanted content, managing robots.txt exclusions, and educating state agencies about the importance of websites as government records. The Web archives are available at http://www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us/archives/webarchives/index.html [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]