How to stop the government from deleting itself

A group of archivists—a coalition from government, academia and nonprofits—has begun capturing the Biden administration’s digital footprint. The monthslong undertaking is called the End of Term Archive, and it has occurred every four years since the George W. Bush administration. Archivists first amass a sprawling list of public government URLs. They then catalog all of those websites (and the websites within those websites) and a snapshot of their content. In the end, it’s as much as 300 terabytes worth of material. The End of Term Archive is preparing for its initial “crawl” of government websites next month, and will then do another around the inauguration in January. A digital copy of those websites will be available almost immediately to the public via the Wayback Machine.