Studying the U.S. Government through Web Archives:
The Shutdown Library and the End of Term Harvest
IIPC General Assembly 2014, Paris, France
Dr. Debbie Rabina (in abentia)
Associate Professor
Dr. Anthony Cocciolo
Assistant Professor
Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science
New York, NY USA
Share with you 2 web archiving projects that I have
worked on with my colleague Debbie Rabina:
• End of Term Harvest
• Shutdown Library
The End of Term (EOT) harvest
During the months preceding the 2008 presidential election, the EOT captured and
archived about 17 terabytes of data
2012: Enter Pratt Institute
• Our role: To locate all
the social media
(Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube, etc.) used by
the U.S. government so
that they can be
archived for posterity.
Timeline for collection of 1513 URLs
Scope: All executive and legislative
branch social media websites
Data Collection Process:
Selection of URLs
Did we capture everything?
Force majeure
Analysis of Collected Data
RQ1: Who uses social media in the
U.S. government?
Table 1: Social Media Use by Government Branch
Branch
URLs
Executive
1,144
Legislative
207
Judicial
4
Unclassified
9
Total social media pages
1,364
Table 2: Social Media Use by Government Agency
Top 10
Agency
URLs
House of Representatives
128
State Department
110
Dept. of Health and Human Services
91
Dept. of Defense
88
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
85
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
52
Homeland Security
36
Senate
21
Veterans Affairs Dept.
18
Army Dept.
17
RQ2: What social media platforms does the U.S. government use?
Platform
Number of URLs
Facebook
430
Twitter
416
YouTube
243
Flickr
135
Pinterest
15
Google +
9
Tumblr
8
LinkedIn
4
Vimeo
3
MySpace
1
Other commercial social media platforms
11
Social media features (e.g., blogging) embedded in official site)
86
RQ3: What observations can be made of
the content the U.S. government makes
available on social media platforms?
Minimal level of e-government
– Presence (brochureware) and Interaction
– But no Transaction
– What about Transformation?
The reach of social media websites
varies widely
State Dept. ejournal on Facebook:
1,900 Likes and 120 comments
Federal Maritime Commission on
Twitter: 5 tweets, 37 followers
Targeted audiences
State Dept. in Arabic
Homeland Security in Spanish
U.S. Health data:
12,637 followers
Central Texas Veterans Center:
What’s for Lunch?
U.S. Border Patrol on Pinterest
EOT: lessons and further possibilities
• All branches of government are using social media
• All social media platforms are used
• E-government levels:
– Presentation, communication as a form of interaction, no
transaction, transformation as a question of interpretation
• Dataset can be used to answer further research
questions:
–
–
–
–
Study of levels of e-government
Study of agencies
Uses of social media as public alert system
Uses of social media as public relations (propaganda)
Shutdown Library
• October 1 -16, 2014, the United States Federal
Government shutdown, leaving government
websites in varying states of disarray.
– Some agencies shutdown their websites
completely, other remained accessible though no
longer maintained, and others seem unaffected.
Objective
• Wanted to have a record of how this
shutdown affected the public ability to access
government information.
– Thus, we web archived the homepages of all
government websites and social media
homepages.
How?
• We needed to act quickly, so we used a listing
of Government homepages and social media
sites from an earlier project (which I will
discuss next).
• For government homepages, we used the
program Zotero to capture the homepage. For
social media sites, we also used Zotero with a
macro to capture all sites.
Public Access
Completely Shutdown
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Bureau of Reclamation
Council on Economic Advisers
Council on Environmental Quality
Domestic Policy Council
Education Resources Information
Center
Federal Trade Commission
International Trade
Administration
International Trade Commission
Library of Congress
Medicare Payment Advisory
Committee
• National Capital Planning
Commission
• National Institute of Food and
Agriculture (NIFA)
• National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST)
• National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA)
• National Park Service
• National Science Foundation
• Office of Justice Programs
• U.S. Census
• U.S. Department of Agriculture
• U.S. Geological Survey
Legislative
Judicial Branch
• From looking at websites, Federal courts did
not participate in the shutdown.
Executive Branch
Conclusions
Very few websites were completely shutdown, and
most websites had a notice of ‘no longer being
updated,’ or allowed users to proceed to content
once they viewed the shutdown notice. It is not
possible at this point to conclude that these highly
visible shutdown notices are a form of political
protest. Future work, such as analyzing records that
will be eventually deposited with the National
Archives or interviews with agency staff, could
reveal the motivations behind the disparate ways
that websites were treated during the federal
shutdown.
Thank you.
Anthony Cocciolo
@acocciolo
acocciol@pratt.edu