University of North Texas

As the Web becomes the dissemination tool of choice for many information producers, many libraries will be collecting materials from this important yet unpreserved information source. Librarians need the capability to identify and select materials in accordance with their established collection development policies, and they also need common metrics to characterize these resources. Organizing the content in Web archives using established schemes is a promising solution to enable the extension of collection development practices to this new class of materials. The development of common metrics will also enable librarians to communicate the scope and value of these materials in the context of their current collections and collecting priorities. In this project, the University of North Texas is partnering with the Internet Archive to investigate these two needs in the area of government information. Government information is represented in many library collections and has a well-established classification scheme, the Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) Classification Numbering System. The project will classify, in accord with the SuDocs system, the materials in the 2008–2009 End-of-Term (EOT) Web, collected by the University of North Texas, which represents the entirety of the federal government’s public Web presence immediately before and after the 2009 change in presidential administrations. This will demonstrate a process by which government resources can be aligned with an individual library’s collecting priorities and also shared among other institutions utilizing the SuDocs system. The project will also identify metrics to translate measurable units for selected materials in Web archives to units more familiar to libraries and more recognizable by university administrators.