To Whom It May Concern:
The United States Library of Congress has selected your Web site for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials related to Election 2008. The Library's traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including Web sites. We request your permission to collect your web site and add it to the Library's research collections. We also ask that we be allowed to display the archived version(s) of your web site.
The following URL has been selected:
thealbanyproject.com
With your permission, the Library of Congress or its agent will engage in the collection of content from your Web site at regular intervals over time. The Library will make this collection available to researchers onsite at Library facilities. The Library also wishes to make the collection available to offsite researchers by hosting the collection on the Library's public access Web site. The Library hopes that you share its vision of preserving Internet materials and permitting researchers from across the world to access them...
For several years, the Library of Congress has collected Web sites within certain themes or topics, such as elections, for which we were required to seek permission for each new collection developed by the Library, even if permission had been granted in the past. As our collections have grown, we have had to contact some Web site producers repeatedly. To reduce this duplication and to save site owners from having to respond to multiple requests for information, we are now requesting permissions for the Library to collect, over time and in varying frequency, sites of research interest. Your site has been identified as a Web site of interest related to Election 2008. If you grant this permission, we will capture your site for inclusion in our Election 2008 Web Archive and may also include it in our future collections related to national elections. If you grant this permission, and in the future you no longer wish to be included in the Library's Web archives, please contact us and we will cease collection of your Web site.
Our Election Web archives are important because they contribute to the historical record of our national elections, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the Web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were "born digital" and never printed on paper. The Library has developed three previous Election Web Archives, in 2000, 2002 and 2004. These Election Archives are available along with our other Web Archive collections through the Library's Web site (http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/). For more information about these and other Web Archive collections please visit our Web site.
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Thank You,
Web Capture Team
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.
Needless to say, I said yes.
