By Michael Falcone
Daily Bruin Contributor
From the basement of Charles E. Young Research Library, a few
ambitious librarians and archivists are helping to put the dot-com
in political history.
Working from two small cubicles in the Maps and Government
Information Library, reference librarian Barbara Silvernail and
computer resource specialist Scott Martin have been working since
1998 to develop an online archive of political campaign and
election literature, including political Web sites.
The MGI Online Campaign Literature Archive is merging the
traditional world of paper campaign posters, pamphlets and booklets
with the world of cyber politics.
While the site includes scanned images of campaign memorabilia
dating back to 1908, what makes it unique is its collection of Web
site “snapshots.”
Martin, who does most of the technical work for the MGIs Online
Campaign Literature archive, said that it’s important to
preserve information on the Internet for posterity.
“This stuff is ephemeral in that if you don’t catch
it while it’s being displayed during the campaign, it’s
gone,” Martin said.
“We realized that if people in the future wanted to
research campaigns, they would want to be able to see the Web sites
as they were during the campaigns,” he continued.
While some Web sites stay up for years, others get taken down
within a few days ““ meaning that without archiving, many
political Web sites would become extinct.
“The life span of individual Web sites is very
short,” said Christine Borgman, a professor in the Department
of Information Studies.
Those who are involved with the MGI project are seeking to
preserve these political Web sites so scholars and researchers will
have a record of what politics was like on the Internet during a
particular time in history.
According to The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based
non-profit organization currently creating an archive of the entire
Internet, Web sites are up for an average of three to six
months.
Like Silvernail and Martin, founders of The Internet Archive
““ which has already saved more than 1 billion Web sites
““ see the Internet as a historical resource.
This new trend in Web archiving spurred questions about how the
Internet will change historical scholarship in the future. In the
past, only books, documents and artifacts were considered primary
resources, but the efforts of Internet archivists are forcing Web
sites to be added to that list.
“To me, a primary source is something that was created by
someone at that time and place,” said Judith Kantor, director
of the UCLA Institute on Primary Resources.
“I don’t see why that “˜thing’
can’t be a Web site,” she added.
Whether or not Web sites fit the criteria for academic study is
still debated among those involved with the technical and social
aspects of information studies. Borgman said that the trend of
archiving Web sites raises questions about the nature of evidence,
authenticity and a concept called fixity.
“When you publish a document, you fix it in particular
manifestation, and that is no longer as true because you might
change a Web site every day,” Borgman said.
Further, she pointed out that now when students and scholars
write bibliographies and make references to Internet sites, the
citations must include references to the date the site was accessed
because the day-to-day site content can change.
The Internet also creates several problems for Martin and others
who do the dirty work of finding, saving and uploading political
Web sites to the MGI server.
Theoretically, it would be possible yet time-consuming to save
every site and image to a computer, but Martin uses a freeware
software program to speed up the downloading process. Still, he
spends time checking each site before he uploads it for the public
to view.
Though Martin is the middle-man in the archival process, he
stressed that, in the interest of historical accuracy, no Web site
is altered in the process of downloading and uploading.
“Except for changing internal links, we actually
don’t change anything,” Martin said. “Sometimes I
even see a typo or two that I could easily fix in the HTML script,
but if they have a mistake in there, I leave it in.”
So far, Martin and Silvernail have archived sites of local,
state and national candidates, and California ballot measures.
Because many of the Web sites are copyrighted, the staff of the
online archive contacts every campaign and organization to obtain
permission to archive the site.
Martin said that since they started the project two years ago,
only one campaign has refused to allow the MGI to use its site,
citing “personal reasons.” Martin noted that the
campaign that refused had recently lost an election.
Currently, the traditional paper sources of the archive are few,
and Martin said because of that, they have a slight Democratic
slant.
“The main source is from donations of library staff, so
it’s very spotty where we get coverage,” Martin
said.
“In the current years there happens to be more Democratic
than Republican stuff because there happen to be more Democrats
than Republicans working in the library,” he continued.
Martin said, however, that with the addition of Web sites to the
archive the project should become less partisan.
“In the future we’re hoping to regularize
things,” he said.