Federal government shutdown: Internet Archive needs your help

Today is the second day that all federal government facilities deemed non-essential have been closed and all federal employees whose jobs have been deemed non-essential have had to stay home. The shutdown has extended -- sometimes in ways that seem to defy common sense -- to the federal government's Web presence. In response to this situation, the tireless souls at the Internet Archive have sprung into action: they're "creating a collection of websites affected by the government shutdown."

At the present time, the only publicly accessible content on many sites is a notice indicating that the site's creator has shut down.

Other federal government entities continue to make large quantities of site content available but stress that the information may not be current, that offices are closed, and that inquiries will not receive prompt attention.

The Internet Archive wants to capture and preserve all of these shutdown notices, contingency plans, and other shutdown-related Web content, and its archivists need your help. If you run across a federal government site that features a shutdown notice or contains information about how the agency will operate during the shutdown, please consider going to the Internet Archive's Government Shutdown Seed URL Nomination Form, entering some basic information about the site and the URL of its home page, and clicking "submit."

If you would like to see whether the Internet Archive has already captured a given site or simply want to check out the collection, Internet Archive has is already making the 2013 Government Shutdown collection available to researchers.