1. Wisconsin County and Municipal Government Collections in Archive-It
Government Information Day, May 29, 2015
Eileen Snyder
Wisconsin State Publications Librarian

2. Local Publications in Print at WHS
County Board Proceedings
Directories
Some reports
Madison and Milwaukee are most complete city collections
All are cataloged

3. What is Archive-It?
“A subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content.”
State partners: Montana State Library; NC State Archives; SD State Library and State Archives; MN Historical Society;
Federal/National partners: GPO; U.S. DHHS; National Library of Australia; Smithsonian; NCES
International: IIPC (International Internet Preservation Consortium); Folger Shakespeare Library
Other example (arts institution): NYARC (New York Art Resources Consortium)
Difference between Archive-It and Wayback: Archive-It is CURATED and FULL-TEXT SEARCHABLE.

4. https://archive-it.org/

5. WHS Collections
OR: Search for Wisconsin Historical Society from the main Archive-It page.
Online Newsletters
Topical Collections: Act 10/Recall, Gubernatorial Elections, Organic and Sustainable Ag, Mining
State Government Collection: State Agency Websites; in collaboration with WHS Archives; in tandem with WDDP
County Collection: Have now crawled (collected) each county at least once (except St. Croix), and are going back for second harvest. Plan to harvest annually. All except one county are cataloged.
Municipal Collection: Just starting.

6. Wisconsin County Government Collection
Began in 2011.
All counties have now been archived at least once, except St. Croix.
All county captures have been cataloged (except St. Croix).
Have also captured the Planning Commission web sites.
Aim to capture counties annually; have started second round of capturing.
Problems: some counties have minutes/agendas in a database. We are working with the engineers at Archive-It to see if we can come up with a way to capture these.
RPC sites: an attempt at getting some of the planning reports. Messy.

7. https://archive-it.org/collections/2789

8. Wisconsin Municipal Government Collection
Not as far along as the County collection.
Began in earnest spring 2015.
Aim is to capture website of each county seat, plus large cities that aren’t county seats.
Some city websites have proven to be more complex than County sites.
Collection started tentatively back in 2011.
I began approaching it systematically this spring.
Starting with county seats; tried to spread out the first batch of municipalities roughly by region, to avoid too much of a Madison/Milwaukee/SE Wisconsin bias. Now working through county seats, starting with the most populous first.
Similar problems to County sites: minutes/agendas in databases; also have ordinances to contend with in some cases.
Madison, for example, had documents going back to 1999 still available on their site (Community Development Block Grant Program).
“Scoping”: what to leave out, what to grab. Grappling with what’s worth having, given that storage space, while large, is not unlimited, nor is staff time to spend scoping.

9. https://archive-it.org/collections/2815

10. Example Catalog Record
Record for Dane County Website. NOTE: Title is the title from the web page caption. Also, fields, one for Live page, one for Archive-It capture, one for Wayback Machine capture. Not all counties have Wayback Capture.

11.
Search for Archive-It

12. Wisconsin Historical Society
Questions?
Eileen Snyder
Wisconsin Historical Society