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Election 2000 Collection online



from Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive, via the "archivists" list at
yahoogroups.com


 Internet Library Enables Users to Surf the Web?s Past
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Group adds dimension of time to the Internet by developing a
collection of Election 2000 Web sites

San Francisco  (June 18, 2001)  Alexa Internet today announced the
Election 2000 Collection, a groundbreaking, large-scale collection of
date-searchable Web sites archived and made available online.

The Election 2000 Collection developed for the U.S. Library of
Congress by the Internet Archive, and Compaq Computer, is now being
made available as an Internet library containing archived copies of
more than 1000 election-related Web sites (http://archive.alexa.com).
The collection, searchable by date, by website, and by category via
Alexa?s new Wayback Machine technology, contains more than two
million megabytes, or about 87 million pages, of election-related
information gathered between August 1, 2000 and January 14, 2001,
including what was published on the candidates? web sites, political
party sites, and major news sites.

The Election 2000 Collection is important because it contributes to
the historical record of the U.S. Presidential Election, capturing
information that could otherwise have been lost. With the growing
role of the Web as an influential medium in our culture, records of
historical events such as the U.S. Presidential election could be
considered incomplete without materials that were ?born digital? and
never printed on paper.  Internet content changes at a very rapid
pace, especially during events such as elections, and indeed many
important election sites have already disappeared from the Web.
With the Election 2000 Collection, rapidly changing sites were
archived daily or even twice and three times in a day in an attempt
to capture the dynamic nature of Internet content.

Florian Baur, a graduate student at University Passau in Germany, is
using the Election 2000 Collection to research a thesis about the
Internet?s role during the recent presidential election.  As an early
user, he found that, ?A thorough analysis would have been virtually
impossible without the collection. ? the collection is a great tool
for anybody interested in the political use of the Web. Due to the
short-lived nature of the medium, institutions like the Internet
Archive provide an almost indispensable service for the scientific
community.?

Compaq Computer undertook the major task of collecting and archiving
sites for the collection.  "Compaq Research was able to deep crawl
hundreds of Web sites each day to build an unprecedented record of
the changing nature of the web.  It was tricky because finding all
the images, videos, and computer scripts associated with each page
required developing specialized technology," said Brewster Kahle,
president of Alexa Internet.

Alexa Internet created the Wayback Machine technology that allows
users to browse this huge collection and other Internet Libraries
like it.  ?By enabling users to retrieve Web sites out of the past,
Alexa?s Wayback Machine technology adds a time dimension to the
Internet and creates the first ?time browser? for the Web,? said
Kahle.
About Alexa Internet
Alexa Internet, the Web Information Company, gathers, stores, indexes
and makes available multi-terabyte digital libraries, collections of
Web sites and other Internet information. The company's Archive of
the Web has been growing since 1996, and now contains over 40
terabytes of data. Alexa also offers a free Web navigation service
(available at www.alexa.com) which gives Internet users access to the
Archive as they surf, as well as detailed information about Web sites
such as related links, contact information, site statistics, and
reviews. The company donates a copy of its Archive of the Web on an
ongoing basis to the non-profit Internet Archive, which is endowed to
preserve our digital heritage for scholarly access. Alexa, a wholly
owned subsidiary of Amazon.com, is located on the Web at
http://www.alexa.com.
--

Rick Prelinger
Prelinger Archives   http://www.prelinger.com
P.O. Box 590622, San Francisco, Calif. 94159-0622
+1 415 750-0445      Fax: +1 415 750-0607
footage@panix.com

Internet Moving Images Archive: http://www.moviearchive.org

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