A volunteer project by a group of libraries, End of Term Presidential Harvest 2016, is saving valuable pages on federal government sites at risk of vanishing
By noon on Thursday, Davis Erin Anderson had copied the addresses of a few dozen websites and online PDFs that listed signs of climate change by state and region.
Context & Ripple Effects
In December 2016, a coalition of libraries launched End of Term Presidential Harvest to copy federal web pages at risk of disappearing with the change of administration — with volunteers like Davis Erin Anderson manually logging addresses of state-by-state climate-change PDFs by noon on day one. It is an early data point in what became a recurring pattern: civil society stepping in when government web records are threatened.
First-order effects
- Federal climate-data pages identified as vulnerable get duplicated into independent library-held copies before they can be taken down, preserving access for researchers who rely on them.
Second-order effects
- The harvest validates dedicated archiving infrastructure: the Internet Archive later cataloged ~73K US government webpages that were expunged, while having grown from 2TB in 1997 to roughly 100PB, making volunteer collection efforts durable rather than one-off.
Third-order effects
- Emergency web preservation becomes organized practice — as seen when [[a:977742|an international group of 1,300 librarians used open-source tools and Slack to back up Ukraine's digital archives]] — but the model carries legal exposure, since the same archive faced a publishers' lawsuit over its National Emergency Library lending program.
The trend: Web archiving is shifting from routine institutional record-keeping to volunteer-driven emergency harvesting of public records whenever governments or crises threaten their availability.