Ever wonder where federal websites go when they die?

To a cyber cemetery, naturally. (Yes, there really are such things.)

The digital CyberCemetery within the University of North Texas Libraries serves as a permanent public archive that provides access to websites of defunct U.S. federal government agencies, usually after they issue their final report. The cemetery - let's just say "archive," shall we? - provides an excellent tool for researchers and others curious about the workings of government past and present.

Documents and other web records of bygone federal government agencies and commissions live on in the CyberCemetery, which can be browsed by agency name or searched. The websites of available agencies and commissions are reproduced in full, complete with internal pages and links.

The first steps toward an archive of decommissioned federal agencies began in 1997 during discussions between UNT Libraries and the U.S. Government Printing Office and included the complete preservation of the website of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. This particular commission was chosen for trial archiving due to its at-risk status and its static content, which would keep the costs of preservation low, according to Starr Hoffman, head of the Government Documents Department at the University of North Texas Libraries. 

Hoffman has taught training classes to government workers - primarily researchers for the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress - that covered the "development and background of CyberCemetery, showed highlights of the content, and gave sample searches showing how to find information," she said.

Early discussions about an archive took place back in1995 after the GPO published its strategic plan, which emphasized a need for federal agencies to save their born-digital content. The GPO was concerned about both information published only on the web, with no print version, and the full websites themselves, especially for temporary Commissions that would be dissolved. Also included in GPO's plan was the immediate formulation of a partnership between UNT Libraries and the GPO, expanded to include the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in 2006, as part of the Federal Library Depository Program.

In 1999 the original 1997 agreement concerning the formulation and scope of the website archive was expanded to include "all defunct federal agency websites," and was renamed CyberCemetery.

According to Hoffman, one of the primary uses of CyberCemetery is as a historic record of agencies and commissions that no longer operate. One of the most popular archives in the CyberCemetery is the website of the 9/11 Commission, officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission's entire report on the 9/11 attacks is available as a free, downloadable PDF, and is the most downloaded file on the entire site, according to Hoffman. The archive also contains video and audio recordings from Commission hearings, "a rich source of primary information on the events and aftermath of September 11, 2001," said Hoffman.

Other archives of note in the CyberCemetery are those of the space shuttle Columbia Accident Investigation Board from 2003, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission from 2001, and the United States Information Agency, which is archived by the University of Illinois at Chicago.

You don't have to be a professional government researcher to benefit from these online archives. Anyone doing a paper on the Child Online Protection Act of 2000 would certainly have interest in the COPA Commission's website, which the Act established, but since that website no longer exists, without CyberCemetery, there would be no easy way to access the information once available on the Commission's website.

Searching the archive is simple: either browse by agency name or retirement date, or enter search terms at the CyberCemetery site. Web users can also access the archive via the USA.gov search engine, the Google U.S. Government Search, or NARA's website.

The list of roughly 50 websites archived in the CyberCemetery hints at the massive task the federal government faces in preserving and keeping accessible all of the non-classified .gov and .mil websites. Links from the North Texas Libraries site point to other web archives such as the 2004 Presidential Term Web Harvest operated by the National Archives, the Clinton White House websites run by the Clinton Presidential Library and other collections by the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago.