Capturing The Bush Legacy Online

The Bush administration will soon be packed and gone, but part of its legacy will live on in cyberspace. A consortium of government and nonprofit agencies plans to capture snapshots of every federal government Web site before Jan. 20, when the next president moves into the White House and starts remaking the federal bureaucracy to fit his agenda. The goal of the 2008 "end-of-term harvest" is to preserve millions of agency records in an online archive that librarians hope will provide a valuable trove for historians, government scholars and the public. The need for such an archive is greater than ever, librarians say. Many federal agency records exist only in digital form and are in danger of disappearing when the administration changes. Digital records are telling, they say, because an administration's policy priorities are often reflected in the face it presents to the world online.