Slaw Now in Library of Congress Main Search Database
Actually, the big news, of course, is that the U.S. Library of Congress has integrated its web archives into its main web search function. For quite some time now, LOC has been archiving significant websites, of which Slaw is one. At the moment there are 940 such sites being archived. Though archiving began in 2008, the archives of Slaw contain some posts reaching back to its inception in 2005 but extend only up to 2010, because the archiving process lags by a few years. (As a digital archivist at LOC explained to me by email, “We do have an embargo period so as to not ‘compete” with the live site. We currently post a year worth of archives at a time . . .”)
According to the LOC data, the Library has made 79,057 captures of Slaw, regularly revisiting 7,707 of the blog’s pages in order, I suppose, to record any changes that might have taken place between captures. I’m not sure that when it comes to blogs this is the most sensible approach, given that a blog entry, once published, rarely changes and that comments tend to fall away after a few weeks or months at the most.
Nevertheless, I’m entirely pleased that now when someone searches www.loc.gov — All Formats — they’ll find results from Slaw where relevant.
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