UCLA launches new archive platform to preserve campaign histories

The end of the recent Los Angeles mayoral elections also brings the digitization of numerous campaign websites. But a new archiving platform within the UCLA Online Campaign Literature Archive will allow these pieces of digital political history to be preserved for years to come.

The UCLA Online Campaign Literature Archive has been collecting websites and printed materials of UCLA and Los Angeles elections since 1998. It is the only archive with a focus on the Los Angeles region, said Gabriella Gray, the project director of the UCLA Online Campaign Archive.

In 2012, the archive transitioned to a new website-capturing tool called the California Digital Library’s Web Archiving Service to ensure that the archive remains sustainable. The archive captures and saves the campaign websites and printed materials as they are before being taken down.

Their online collection includes materials ranging from a scanned copy of a black-and-white Republican Party election pamphlet of 1908 to an archived YouTube video of Governor Brown’s discussion of the state budget in 2012.

“Websites don’t stay very long. They change,” Gray said. “We have to preserve that culture and history,”

Currently, just two staff members – Gray and her colleague Scott Martin, the computer resource specialist – manage the archive.

Previously, Martin and Gray did all of the web-capturing manually. That method was unsustainable because it required numerous steps, making the process tedious and inefficient, Gray said.

The system was relatively easy to maintain when they were archiving 10 or 20 sites per year, but after growing to 400 sites annually, it became apparent that they could not keep up with the influx of websites, Martin said.

The previous method was also dependent on Martin’s skills because he is the only staff member who knows how to operate the system, said Gray, who mostly directed the program.

Gray said she was very proud of the project and wanted to make sure that it survived after she and Martin left.

The new method increased efficiency by simplifying the web-capturing options of the archive and allowing staff to more easily archive yearly election-related websites, Gray said. All the staff has to do is enter the main website address and specify the capture time, and the capturing tool will do its work.

Jeffrey Lewis, a UCLA professor of political science, said he thinks the archive will be a good resource for himself and his students in the future.

“It will be a real advantage for me in preparing the class and also for students in doing their research projects,” Lewis said.

The new materials from 2012 to the present will be archived, while the materials dating before 2012 will remain in the UCLA Library’s digital collections.

Due to coding differences between the new method and the previous web-capturing tool, materials before 2012 could not be migrated to the new platform, Martin said.

“However, the next version of the (online archive) will enable us to link both the older and the new platforms together, offering users easier accessibility,” Gray said.

With a new and more sustainable model, Gray and Martin said they think the archive can continue being a source of information for years to come.