2019This microgrant proposal is currently in progress. The PI is Ed Busch and other
MSU team members include myself, Jessica Martin, Eli Landaverde, and
Lydia. The proposed project would allow us to capture vulnerable local election
websites with intrinsic research value and archive these sites on Archive-It for future researchers. If funded, this project would commence in summer/fall 2019
and run through the 2020 election cycle.

The Michigan Politics Web Archiving Project is a microgrant funded by the MSU
Libraries to capture websites related to local political issues, such as candidate websites
and local government pages, including meeting minutes, agendas, and videos as these
sites are rarely archived, taken down promptly after elections, but incredibly important to
future researchers. This team is comprised of myself, Ed Busch, Elisa Landaverde,
Jessica Martin, and Lydia Tang. We held a focus group with faculty in History and
Political Science, Library of Michigan staff, and the Ingham County Clerk to talk about
the types of local sites that would be most beneficial to their research and in their classrooms. I used that feedback to generate a spreadsheet of websites for Ingham
County candidates from the 2019 election cycle and searched to see if and how often
these sites might be preserved through the Internet Archive. Our funding allowed us to
hire a graduate student to do the web capturing and I created a libguide to serve as an
access point to the captures housed in Archive-lt. Ed Busch and I presented a lightning
talk at the Mid Michigan Digital Practioners meeting to talk about this project, with
presentation slides created by the entire grant team. Additionally, the grant team is
collaboratively creating presentation slides that all of the team members can use to
present at professional conferences. We’re also creating a follow-up survey for our focus
group participants and their feedback will be incorporated into our final report.

This microgrant explored the capture and curation of local political and election websites
using an existing Archive-It subscription. Local election websites are particularly
vulnerable to loss and are less likely to be captured, which is challenging for researchers
since so much content for elections is born-digital. Grant team members in addition to
myself are Ed Busch, Jessica Martin, Elisa Landaverde, and Lydia Tang.

• On September 12, 2019, the grant team hosted a focus group of nine individuals
  (five faculty members (three from Political Science and two from History), one
  participant from local government, two stakeholders from the Library of Michigan,
  and one stakeholder from MSU Libraries (not inclusive of the microgrant team).
  I created a spreadsheet of websites to crawl for this project and checked to see if
  these sites have already been crawled by the Internet Archive, and if crawled,
  how frequently.
  I created a libguide with links to the Archive-It crawls to help users access the
  archived websites.
  We are collaboratively creating a follow up survey to send to the focus
• group participants asking for their feedback regarding the libguide and the
• project as a whole.
• We are working on writing a final report discussing our project and methods and
  to provide suggestions for how this project could be continued and expanded to
  better preserve these particularly vulnerable websites.

Mid Michigan Digital Practitioners November 1, 2019

• Presented a lightning presentation on the Michigan Politics Web Crawling Project
  (more details below) with Ed Busch, with presentation slides created by
  collaboratively with the grant team members (myself, Ed, Jessica Martin, Elisa
  Landaverde, and Lydia Tang).

Finished working on the Michigan Politics Web Archiving micro grant project. We issued
our final report in April 2020. We continued crawling Michigan local election websites for
the November 2020 election. The project team is working on a journal article about our
efforts for this project.

My role on this team
is to identify appropriate local election websites for capture, and once captured, to add the links to
the web archived pages to this project’s libguide. We also submitted an article about this project to
the journal DttP: Documents to the People and it was published in fall 2021.

Sarah Mainville volunteered and we happily added her to our team. 2023