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? BranchURLs Executive1,144 Legislative207 Judicial4 Unclassified9 Total social media pages1,364 Table 1: Social Media Use by Government Branch

Table 2: Social Media Use by Government Agency AgencyURLs House of Representatives128 State Department110 Dept. of Health and Human Services91 Dept. of Defense88 National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)85 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)52 Homeland Security36 Senate21 Veterans Affairs Dept.18 Army Dept.17 Top 10

RQ2: What social media platforms does the U.S. government use? PlatformNumber of URLs Facebook430 Twitter416 YouTube243 Flickr135 Pinterest15 Google +9 Tumblr8 LinkedIn4 Vimeo3 MySpace1 Other commercial social media platforms11 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 ArabicHomeland Security in Spanish

U.S. Health dataU.S. Health data: 12,637 followers Central Texas Veterans CenterCentral Texas Veterans Center: What’s for Lunch?

U.S. Border Patrol on PinterestPinterest

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