U.S. Department of Labor announces digital snapshot
project to archive content of all departmental Web sites

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Labor today announced that it will launch an online digital library to archive its Web sites under a contract with the San Francisco-based Internet Archive.

Through an on-demand system, the Web Snapshot Initiative was designed to capture the content of all departmental Web sites for historical purposes — thus documenting the department's missions, goals and programs on the site as of mid-January 2009.

The project, which commenced during the first week of January 2009, will archive complete working copies of approximately five million Labor Department Web site documents that will be made available to the public through the department's main Web site at www.dol.gov/Archive and through the Wirtz Labor Library collection at www.library.dol.gov. Copies of the documents will be stored to help meet the National Archives and Records Administration's (NARA) records management requirements. Archived documents will be available for viewing no later than Jan. 23.

"The new online archive will give the public and government easy and secure access to the historical records of the Labor Department," said Paul Craven, the department's director of enterprise communications. "The system will provide greater transparency of government documents available through the department's Web sites."

The Internet Archive houses an online digital library in partnership with the Library of Congress and NARA. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that was founded in 1996 to build an "Internet Library," with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. The organization has the largest public Web archive available, comprising 100 billion pages and more than 65 million Web sites in 37 languages. The Internet Archive's other federal partners include the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine. National libraries of Australia, Chile, Israel, Singapore, Spain and other countries also use this service.

Archived News Release — Caution: Information may be out of date.