Frequently Asked Questions: Digital Collections

The Library archives websites that are selected by the Library’s subject experts, known as Recommending Officers, based on guidance set forth in subject-focused Collections Policy Statements and the format-focused Supplementary Guidelines for Web Archiving and Social Media. Collecting occurs around subjects, themes, and events identified by Library staff. Recommending Officers select “seed” URLs, which are a starting point for the crawler, and can be a full domain, a subdomain, or simply one page or document – whatever is the desired web content to archive. Depending on the topic of the site, it might have been selected for archiving in multiple thematic or event archives. Our archives cover a wide variety of subjects and topics, with web content published in the United States and internationally.

If you would like to nominate a website for archiving, contact the Web Archiving Section and your suggestion will be forwarded to one of our Recommending Officers for consideration. Recommending Officers will review suggestions, but do not guarantee that they will be added to the archive.