For my part, I'm stunned at how comprehensive this archive is. The few
pages I've accessed have been very complete, with working links and
pull-down menues and working Java funcions, and intact images. The only
things I've noticed as missing so far are the audio and video clips. I
presume if these were streamed rather than file transfers, it will be
enormously difficult to archive them -- but they are of prime interest to
media archives.

I hope all the other parties to this list will also have time to test this
challenging archival achievment.

Congratulation to all concerned. Regards,

> Richard Wright
> Technology Manager, Projects
> Information & Archives
> BBC Finance, Property & Business Affairs
> * Work: +44 (0)20 857 61341
> * Mobile: +44 (0)7802 469 684
> * Fax: +44 (0)20 8569 9374
> ** S120 South Block
> Reynards Mill, Windmill Rd
> Brentford, Middlesex TW8 9NQ - UK
> * mailto:richard.wright@...
> * http://research.gateway.bbc.co.uk/ia/
>


-----Original Message-----
From: Brewster Kahle [mailto:brewster@...]
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2001 9:59 PM
To: archivists@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [archivists] Surf through Time



The archive has must made a 2TB collection of past websites browsable.
Give it a try and please send any comments you have to this list or straight
to the Internet Archive.

I am hoping this points towards one of the "big ideas" in defining library
services in the digital age.

-brewster




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.


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