Purpose

The 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, 2012, 2016, and 2020.

whitehouse.gov capture from September 15, 2008 whitehouse.gov capture from March 21, 2013 whitehouse.gov capture from February 3, 2017
Whitehouse.gov captures from: September 15, 2008; March 21, 2013; and February 3, 2017.

Archive Scope

The End of Term Web Archive contains federal government websites (.gov, .mil, etc) in the Legislative, Executive, or Judicial branches of the government. Websites that were at risk of changing (i.e., whitehouse.gov) or disappearing altogether during government transitions were captured. Local government websites, or any other site not part of the federal government domain were out of scope.

U.S. Federal Government Domain End of Term 2020 Web Archive

For the End of Term 2020, The Library of Congress, University of North Texas Libraries, Internet Archive, Stanford University Libraries, and the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) joined efforts again, this time with new partners Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), to preserve public United States Government websites at the conclusion of the presidential administration ending January 20, 2021. This web harvest – like its predecessors in 2008, 2012, and 2016 – was intended to document the federal government’s presence on the World Wide Web during the transition of presidential administrations and to enhance the existing collections of the partner institutions. This broad comprehensive crawl of the .gov domain includes as many federal .gov sites as we could find, plus federal content in other domains (such as .mil, .com, and social media content) and FTP’d datasets.

Nominations made by individual URL for inclusion in the End of Term Presidential Harvest 2020 are availabe to view in the Nomination Tool. URLs submitted for consideration in bulk form via files were added to a separate bulk Nomination Tool instance. The files containing the bulk list URLs have also been added to a GitHub repository. The entirety of the archived content is currently being held by the Internet Archive.

Browse the End of Term Web Archive