Web archiving of the 2007 federal election.(News & Events)

Media commentators and Internet evangelists have long been predicting the time when the Internet would become not only the main conduit for information, but also the place where the national debate was held. It is clear now that the 2007 federal election can safely be adjudged as the first in which the Internet was not just the repository for information, but was also a tool both to communicate policies to the public and to allow potential voters in return to interact in multiple ways with the parties and their candidates. It is impossible to say what effect this had on the electoral outcome, and assuredly as in previous elections not every voter would have visited an election website. However, the Internet is now and remains the only medium in which all those involved in the elections are present. It is the only place where the general public can examine the political parties' policies, as the days of the printed manifesto or policy brochure are long gone. It is also therefore the place of record, and as such needs to be preserved.

PANDORA, Australia's web archive (http://pandora.nla.gov.au), has been preserving websites since 1996. Every election since that date has been archived; the early ones on a basic level (for technological reasons), the later ones more comprehensively. The National Library of Australia, all mainland state libraries and the Northern Territory Library contribute content to PANDORA. To date, the 2007 federal election collection is the biggest thus far attempted. In total around 350 websites were archived by the National Library and its participating libraries, with many of these sites gathered several times to capture changing content. In this way we could record the campaign leading up to election day and the reaction afterwards.
In this election all media, lobby groups and political parties used video as a campaign tool. This medium had been sparingly used in the past, due to technical difficulty, lack of a viable delivery platform and an awareness of the average Australian home Internet bandwidth restrictions; in 2007, however, video became ubiquitous. Two factors have coalesced to make video so widespread. Digital cameras with the ability to film short videos, with good resolution, have become affordable and thus accessible to most households. The emergence of YouTube and similar websites have also made the process of posting and hosting videos free and simple. The technology developed by YouTube has also revolutionised the ability to seamlessly embed and play back video on its own site as well as on any other website, blog or social networking page.
The biggest challenge in archiving this election was the large number of videos, as the process of archiving videos on party websites generally had to be done individually and each webpage containing a video had to be re-coded to make it function. The largest websites archived were the Australian Broadcasting Corporation election web pages (http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-76826) and the Google Australia Votes site (http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-76644), which was about 5 Gb in size and had over 700 videos linked to it.
All the archived election collections can be viewed from http://pandora.nla.gov.au/subject/6.
Edgar Crook
Senior Librarian, Web Archiving Section

Crook, Edgar