The Library of Congress is now archiving POPVOX content — including your comments to Congress* — for the official national historical record.
We have been notified by the Library of Congress that POPVOX has been selected for inclusion in the official digital archives of the United States. (The full notice is posted below.) The Library of Congress preserves “the Nation’s cultural artifacts” and “materials of historical importance to the Congress and the American people.” This mission extends to digital materials, and the Library has identified POPVOX as an important part of a collection of materials related to public policy topics and the historical record of the United States.
The POPVOX team is extremely honored by this announcement. We set out nearly five years ago to create a site that would bring the “Voice of the People” to lawmakers in Washington and to aid legislators in making more informed decisions. Since then, approximately 400,000 POPVOX users like you — all verified constituents — have registered millions of comments on pending bills in Congress. From SOPA to the Second Amendment, Sequesters to Shutdowns, and tens of thousands of other bills working through the legislative process, POPVOX users have shared their voice and we’ve delivered each comment to Congress and aggregated them on POPVOX.com, sortable by state or Congressional district.
We thank you for sharing your voice on POPVOX and look very forward to working with you in the future to bring new opportunities for participation, better information for legislators, and more tools for our 21st Century democracy.
Marci, Rachna and the entire POPVOX Team
* Please note that only information publicly available on POPVOX will be included in the the Library of Congress archive. Non-public information will not be accessed by the Library's scrapers.
Notice to POPVOX from the Library of Congress Web Archiving Team:
The United States Library of Congress has selected your website for inclusion in the Library's historic collection of Internet materials related to public policy topics. We consider your website to be an important part of this collection and the historical record.
The Library of Congress preserves the Nation's cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The Library's traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including websites.
The following URL has been selected: http://www.popvox.com
In order to properly archive this URL, and potentially other URLs of interest on your site, we may archive both this URL and other portions of your site, including public content that your page links to on third party sites such as Facebook, YouTube, etc. The Library of Congress or its agent will engage in the collection of content from your website at regular intervals and may include it in future collections. The Library will make this collection available to researchers at Library facilities and by special arrangement.
The Library may also make the collection available more broadly by hosting the collection on the Library's public access website no earlier than one year after our archiving has been completed. The Library hopes that you share its vision of preserving web materials focusing on public policy topics and permitting researchers from across the world to access them.
Our web archives are important because they contribute to the historical record, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were "born digital" and never printed on paper. For more information about these web archive collections, please visit our website (http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/).
FAQ about the LOC Web Archive:
(Excerpts from http://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/)
What is the Library of Congress Web Archive?
The Library of Congress Web Archive is a collection of archived websites grouped by theme, event, or subject area. Web archiving is the process of creating an archival copy of a website. An archived site is a snapshot of how the original site looked at a particular point in time. The Library’s goal is to document changes in a website over time. This means that most sites are archived more than once. The archive contains as much as possible from the original site, including text, images, audio, videos, and PDFs.
How much of a website is collected in the archive?
The Library’s goal is to create an archival copy—essentially a snapshot—of how the site appeared at a particular point in time. Depending on the collection, the Library archives as much of the site as possible, including html pages, images, flash, PDFs, audio, and video files, to provide context for future researchers. The Heritrix crawler is currently unable to archive streaming media, "deep web" or database content requiring user input, and content requiring payment or a subscription for access. In addition, there will always be some websites that take advantage of emerging or unusual technologies that the crawler cannot anticipate.
How often and for how long will you collect my site?
Typically the Library crawls a website once a week or once monthly, depending on how frequently the content changes. Some sites are crawled more infrequently—just once or twice a year.
The Library may crawl your site for a specific period of time or on an ongoing basis. This varies depending on the scope of a particular project. Some archiving activities are related to a time-sensitive event, such as before and immediately after a national election, or immediately following an event. Other archiving activities may be ongoing with no specified end date.
What will people see when they access the archived site?
Your archived site will appear much like it was on the day it was archived. The Library tries to capture the content as well as the look and feel. In our interface on www.loc.gov/lcwa, there will be a banner at the top of the page that alerts researchers that they are viewing an archived version. The date that the site was archived also appears in this banner. In our newpresentation, the archived site will appear within a viewer that provides similar information. Researchers will be able to navigate the archived site much like the live web. Some items do not work in the archive, such as mailto links, forms, fields requiring input (e.g. search boxes), some multimedia, and some social networking sites.
When will my archived site be available to researchers?
Web archive collections are made available as permissions, Library policies, and resources permit. The Library will generally apply a one-year embargo from the last crawl before the collection is made available to researchers. This is due to production and cataloging work that occurs for each archived site. For collection release announcements please subscribe to our RSS feed by clicking on the subscribe button on this page, or by visiting http://www.loc.gov/rss.
