Social Science Librarian
Stephen (Social Sciences) Woods
He/him/his
Contact:
Office: 208 Paterno Library, University Park
Phone: 814.865.0665
Finding harvested government information (free resources)
- govinfo This link opens in a new windowThe Government Publishing Office provides an important service for access to authenticated digital content. This is particularly true for important legal documents (cases, statutes, regulations, etc...).
- Congress.GovLibrary of Congress' database to materials used for legislation published by Congress. Coverage dates vary on the type of publication.
- Congressional web sites (NARA harvest)The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) conducts a web harvest (i.e. capture) of Federal Agency public websites in 2004. Starting in 2006-present, NARA began conducting web harvests of Congressional websites at the end of each Congress.
- National Archives and Records [Biden White House Web Site]Archive of whitehouse.gov of the Biden administration.
Finding permanent goverment information (Penn State Only)
- Lion Search (Government Information)The University Library is a Federal Depository Library with a commitment to collect, preserve and provide access to US government information.
- Congressional This link opens in a new windowCongressional provides access to the best web resources for congressional and legislative information. (1789-to date)
- Policy Commons This link opens in a new windowDatabase for public policy, with more than 3.2 million reports, working papers, policy briefs, data sources, and media. Primarily NGOs, IGOs and think tanks, but includes many archived reports from Federal and State government agencies.
- Nexis Uni This link opens in a new windowCourt cases, regulations, and statutes from all federal and state jurisdictions are included. Most resources can be searched in full text.
- Westlaw Campus Research - Law This link opens in a new windowComprehensive database of resources for researching U.S. Law. It includes primary sources including case law, statutes and regulations at the federal and state levels as well as secondary sources, e.g., American Law Reports, American Jurisprudence, and over 800 law reviews.
- HeinOnline This link opens in a new windowHein Online is a full-text research collection offering more than 900 legal journals; federal publications such as the Federal Register, U.S. treaties and agreements, U.S. Supreme Court opinions, federal legislative histories, presidential documents; a collection of legal classics; and Philip C. Jessup International Moot Court competition materials.
Web harvesting (efforts)
- End of Term Web ArchiveThe End of Term Web Archive captures and saves U.S. Government websites at the end of presidential administrations. The EOT has thus far preserved websites from administration changes in 2008-present.
- National Archives and Records Administration (harvest)The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) conducts a web harvest (i.e. capture) of Federal Agency public websites in 2004. Starting in 2006-present, NARA began conducting web harvests of Congressional websites at the end of each Congress.
- Library of Congress Web Archiving ProgramAccess to archived web content selected by subject experts from across the Library. Some international content (i.e. African nations).
- Common CrawlThe Common Crawl, non-profit, corpus contains petabytes of data, regularly collected since 2008.Partner with the Internet Archive with data freely available through Amazon Web Services.
Web Harvesting Organizations
- International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC)International effort charted by the National Library of France to collect, preserve and provide access to content of the web.
- Internet Archive [raw data]A non-profit organization that has worked with numerous partners including important US federal agencies. [Link to large raw data files]
- National Digital Information Infrastructure & Preservation Program (NDIIPP)Library of Congress program to coordinate the collection and preservation of digital content.
In January 2005, NARA issued Guidance on Managing Web Records to address agencies' responsibilities for identifying, managing, and scheduling web materials they identify as Federal records. Accordingly, each agency is responsible, in coordination with NARA, for determining how to manage its web records, including whether to preserve a periodic snapshot of its entire web page.