The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded an investigation and planning effort, coordinated by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), on the preservation of Web-based political communications. The investigation is to help ensure long-term availability of the important documents and messages disseminated via the World Wide Web by non-governmental political groups and parties. These kinds of materials comprise a valuable source of historical and social science information, but they are by nature fugitive and susceptible to loss. The Mellon- funded investigation will lay the groundwork for their cooperative preservation. Participating in the effort are the San Francisco-based Internet Archive and four university partners: Cornell University, New York University, Stanford University, and the University of Texas at Austin. The grant awarded was in the amount of $445,000.

Within the past decade the World Wide Web has emerged as a vital medium of political communication. It now serves political activists, parties, popular fronts, and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a global message board through which to communicate with constituents and the world community. The Web provides a widely accessible and relatively unrestricted medium for rapid broadcast of information and public posting of critical documents such as manifestoes, constitutions, declarations, and treaties. Two notable examples of political Web communications are an on-line manifesto of the Liberation Army of the Free Papua Movement in Indonesia; and the declaration of the state of Cabinda's independence from Angola by the territory's government in exile.

These communications are the digital-era counterparts of the posters, pamphlets, and other forms of "street literature" that have long provided historians and policy analysts indispensable data on political activities and social and ideological trends. Despite their value such materials tend to be produced sporadically and to change and disappear rapidly. This fugitive character threatens their future availability as source materials for analysis and research.

The CRL investigation will use Web communications produced by political groups in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Sub Saharan Africa and by radical organizations in Europe as a test bed of materials. The effort will produce a framework and general specifications for three aspects of ongoing, sustainable archiving:

1. Long-term resource management: The organizational and economic framework necessary to support archiving, management, and preservation of Web political materials on an ongoing, cooperative basis.
2. Curatorship: The optimal curatorial regimes and practices for identification, targeting and capture of Web political communications to be archived.
3. Technology: The general technical requirements, specifications, and tools best suited to the capture and archiving of political communications.

The project will build upon the investigations currently underway at the partner universities, the Internet Archive, and the Library of Congress, and will draw conclusions and identify methodologies that can be applied to the harvesting of similar materials from all regions.

The project will be linked with a closely related investigation of the California Digital Library (CDL) that is also being supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The CDL project focus will be the capture and persistent management of a type of resource comparable to Web-based political communications - notably web-based materials produced or disseminated by US state and federal governments. Consultation among these efforts, pooling of expertise, and sharing of findings will ensure that the benefits of the investigations accrue to the larger scholarly research community and to the national preservation effort.

The Center for Research Libraries will provide an organizational umbrella for the project, building upon its longstanding work in developing and preserving resources for humanities and social science research from all major regions of the world. Results of the investigation will be published to the Web by the Center at the close of the project term. During the investigation findings will also be reported periodically to members of the scholarly community through area and historical studies societies and at the American Historical Association meeting. For the library profession, progress and results will also be reported through the Association of Research Libraries, Coalition for Networked Information, and other channels as appropriate.

Founded in 1949, the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries. The consortium acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available to member institutions through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery.

The Center's mission is to support advanced research and teaching in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences by ensuring the survival and availability of the knowledge resources vital to those activities. The Political Communications Web archiving initiative is part of the Center's continual effort to actively support the cooperative gathering and preservation of international materials in the digital realm.

For additional information, consult the CRL's Political Communication Web Archiving Project site, or contact: