UCLA Online Campaign Literature Web Archive is now available

In 2012, the UCLA Online Campaign Literature Archive team started using WAS to capture elections for local, state, and federal offices affecting the Los Angeles area, as well ballot measure websites from California state and local Los Angeles area elections.

They have now gone live with the collection: http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/uclacampaignlit

Explore their comprehensive collection of 2012 candidate sites and ballot measures. For example, there are 26 sites from California candidates running for US Senate (18 sites from candidates running for California Senate), including Democrats and Republicans and candidates from a variety of other party affiliations. California candidates running for US House are equally well represented. In addition, both sides of California propositions 28-40 have also been archived. Finally, there is also a comprehensive collection of Los Angeles and Santa Monica specific election and ballot issues.

Background

The UCLA Library has a long history of collecting campaign flyers, pamphlets, posters, and bumper stickers, dating back to the 1920s. Their UCLA Online Campaign Literature Archive presents a subset of these materials from 1908 – 1939, 1940 and 2000.

In 1998, they began archiving websites. After years of using a variety of web capture programs, they were looking for a more sustainable model. That is where WAS comes in. After conducting a comparison of their current method and WAS, they made the decision to move to WAS (read the details about their comparison in Gabriella Gray and Scott Martin’s recent D-lib Magazine article http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may13/gray/05gray.html).