Resources

• Political Communication Web Archiving Project CRL's project Website, with project proposal, meeting notes, contacts, etc.

• Project PowerPoint Presentation for ECDL2003

• UNESCO Thesaurus and Thesaurus section with Political Terms

• Related Sites General, Implementations & Exemplars, Intellectual Property & Copyright ...

• Internet Archive Testbed of URLs

• LANIC Staff Reports:
  • Archival Access Policies Adrienne Sonder, June 19, 2003
  • Standard library practices for abiding copyright law with printed materials Adrienne Sonder, January 8, 2003
  • Factors that affect frequency of capture in website archiving Adrienne Sonder, March 6, 2003

• Criteria for Evaluating Target Sites for Incorporation onto LANIC Pages

Exercises

1. Latin American Electoral Processes

Testbed: This exercise consisted of running 148 URLs from the Electoral Observatory through the Internet Archive. The sample URLs covered a total of 21 elections held in Latin America between December 1998 and June 2002. Each of the original Electoral Observatory pages were built at the time of the election, with links to live election-related sites. Dead links were not subsequently removed from these pages.

Findings:

Major findings from this exercise include:
a) Coverage
• Of the 148 total sites, 61% no longer exist on the Web.
  
• Of the 148 total sites, 13% were not in the archive at all.
  
• Of the 129 sites in the Archive in 36% of the cases, the crawl dates did not include the critical period leading up to the elections.

b) Access to Content
• In 60% of the 129 covered sites, the Archive version provided only limited access to the site content.

More detailed findings from the electoral exercise are avilible here.

2. Latin American Left Parties & Groups

Testbed: This exercise consisted of reviewing the presence in the Internet Archive of a total of 69 Latin American radical parties and organizations. The list of links is on the site of Argentina's "Partido Obrero".

Findings:

• Out of a total 18 Trotskyite groups, 15 sites are still live on the Web and 16 are present in the Archive.
• Out of a total 32 Leftist organizations, 27 sites are still live on the Web and 30 are present in the Archive.
• Out of a total 19 Marxist organizations, 17 are still live on the Web and 18 are present in the Archive.
• Out of the total 69 sites, 85% are still live on the Web, 92% of the 69 sites are present in the Archive, and 81% of the sites in the Archive have access to significant content beyond at least the first level.
• Out of a total 5 Central American former guerilla group sites only 1 is still live on the Web and all 5 are in the Archive. (www.urng.com; www.fmln.org; www.fmln.org.sv; www.fsln.org.ni; netra.tmx.com.ni/~fsln)

3. Argentine Protest Movement

Testbed: Guía Cacerolera is a directory with links to over 100 Web Sites related to the Argentine protest movements of 2001-2002.

Findings: A check run by LANIC staff on 11/14/2002 revealed that all but 9 out of the 82 sites in the "General" category were reachable on the Web. 52 of the 82 sites, or 63% of the total, were not present in the Internet Archive at all.

list some of the possible causes for this high incidence

cite Villalon's thesis experience Piquetes, Cacerolazos y Asambleas Vecinales: Social Protests in Argentina, 1993-2002

4. Central American NGOs

Testbed:These 16 URLs were listed for Web Sites of Nicaraguan NGOs on the IBW Internet Gateway (archived copy at the Internet Archive for March 1, 2000.

Findings: Out of the 16, 25% (4 sites) are no longer on the Web, and 15 of the 16 sites are present in the Internet Archive.

5. Brazilian Shantytown Organizations

Testbed: This exercise consisted of reviewing the presence in the Internet Archive of a total of 22 Brazilian sites with favela activist content.

Findings:

• Out of a total 22 sites, 11, or 50%, are still live on the Web and 7 are present in the Archive.
• Of the 11 sites that no longer exist on the Web, 4 are present in the Archive.
• Of the 11 sites that are still live, 3 are present in the Archive.
• 2 archived sites contain time-sensitive materials and have been captured infrequently.

6. HTTrack Timing Exercise

Exercise Results

7. Blogs

Sample Latin American "Political" Blogs