For additional information:
Kirsten A. Foot, Ph.D. - 206.543.4837
Steven M. Schneider, Ph.D. - 315. 792.7331

WORLD'S FIRST FULLY CATALOGUED, LARGE-SCALE WEB ARCHIVE OF BORN DIGITAL MATERIAL OPENS TO THE PUBLIC

WASHINGTON, DC (March 5, 2003) - Americans interested in visiting an archive commissioned by the Library of Congress no longer need airfare to Washington, D.C. A new Web site launched this week provides access to the world's first, fully catalogued and searchable collection of material that is "born digital."

The Web site allows anyone with Internet access to research archived information in a way that was never before possible and heralds the future of electronic archives.

The Web site, http://politicalweb.info, provides public access to the world's largest collection of catalogued, born digital, Web accessible material. The collection, commissioned by the Library of Congress, includes more than 1,100 archived Web sites from political candidates running for House, Senate and Governorships in 2002. Born digital information is content that originates in digital form.

"This week marks the beginning of a new era in preserving born digital material that is user-friendly, interlinked and content rich," said Kirsten Foot, a professor with the University of Washington and one of the two lead researchers for the Web site. "This collection opens a window into the diverse, historical and cultural perspectives reflected on the Web."

The collection, called the Election 2002 Web Archive, contains more than three thousand unique URLs, has 1.3 terabytes of data and almost 50 million Web objects. The size of the archive underscores the importance of preserving and cataloguing born digital material, Foot said. Experts estimate that about seven million pages are add every day to the more than four billion Web pages that already exist online. However, Web sites have an average lifespan of only 44 to 70 days. Once pages are gone, they're gone forever - along with the cultural history, intellectual property and historical value that is found in archived paper documents. About 44 percent of the Web sites created in 1998 were gone by 1999.

"Everyone acknowledges the importance of preserving born digital material, but until recently information has not been saved in a way that can be easily retrieved and made useful to people," said Steve Schneider, co-director of the project and a professor at SUNY IT. "We are pioneering ways of collecting, cataloguing and preserving large-scale Web content that will dramatically enhance scholarship. Tomorrow's scholarly collections will not only be on library shelves, they'll also be online."

The Election 2002 Web Archive is a joint project of The Library of Congress, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and WebArchivist.org, founded in 2001 and co-directed by Drs. Foot and Schneider. For more information, visit http://politicalweb.info.

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