University of Toronto Librarians Harvesting Government Websites

This is a follow-up to the Library Boy post of January 4, 2016 entitled Canadian Librarians Track Down Fugitive Federal Government Documents.

Last week, U of T News, a publication of the University of Toronto, had a profile of librarians from that institution who have been leading efforts to archive government websites: 

"U of T’s collection includes captures of about 200 Canadian federal government websites from the end of Library and Archives Canada’s web archiving program in 2007 as well as archives of 60 sites from the Ontario government web domain and 7 sites for the city of Toronto."

"The effort began three years ago when U of T Government Publications and Reference Librarian Sam-chin Li and librarians from other universities discovered that the Harper government was shutting down the Aboriginal Canada Portal site within a week. U of T librarians rushed to figure out how they’d capture the online information (...)"

"That was followed by another shock a few months later – a leaked document showing that more federal government websites could be terminated or at least 60 percent of their content reduced."

"It was a wake-up call to U of T librarians. They needed to begin archiving the website content themselves."