Archiving Foreign Government Statistical Web Sites for all at Indiana University Libraries.

Context: In his overview of web archiving initiatives at Global Resources Network (http://www.crl.edu/grn/index.asp) institutions, James Simon of the Center for Research Libraries lists ten active initiatives for capturing and curating web sites, including Archive-It's subscription-based archiving service. Indiana University Libraries is among the institutions that began subscribing to Archive-It (http://www.archive-it.org/) in 2006 in order to capture, preserve, and search web sites, without needing technical support or infrastructure. This paper will focus on a government information web site archiving project - one of three collections being archived at Indiana University. Two of the collections are obviously clearly related to local preservation needs: the web sites of Indiana University, and selected state of Indiana and local government web sites. The third collection, which is the subject of the paper, consists of web sites of national level governmental statistical agencies outside the European Union, Australia, Canada, and the USA. For more than half a century at Indiana, selection and acquisition of documents produced at the national level by governments outside the United States has emphasized key genres for social science and historical research: statistical abstracts, legislative reports, development plans, and education reports, for example. As a greater proportion of this material became available only on the web, we chose to devote some of our budget to preserving web sites rather than specific documents through Archive-It. Cooperation: The archived web sites are freely available and searchable by key word or URL at the Archive-It web site. Institutions can add supplementary search interfaces, web sites, and user aids outside the Archive-It interface, and determine how often to capture, disable, or add new sites. Like much at Indiana, work on developing this project took place in a committee or working group. This one had participation from Cataloging, the University Archives, and Collection Development staff. Technology staff was not involved, and a subject librarian maintains accompanying web resources and seeds for each collection. Supplementary finding aids include records for our collections at the top level in our local catalog and OCLC WorldCat, paper collection brochures, and web links such as these: http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=4302 http://www.archive-it.org/collections/317 http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=4981 Wider issues of current cooperative concern revolve around making certain we are not duplicating the efforts of others in this area. Selection of seeds which are not being archived elsewhere, seeking information about registry plans for URLs, and other aspects of cooperation will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]