Library of Congress Collecting Law Blogs

This email I received today appears from the headers to be a genuine message:

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 Legal Blogs. 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:

www.discourse.net

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. If you agree to permit the Library to collect your Web site, please click the following link to signify your consent. This link also includes a separate consent for permitting the Library to provide offsite access to your materials through the Library's Web site.

[very long url]

For several years, the Library of Congress has collected Web sites within certain themes or topics 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 Legal Blogs. If you grant this permission, we will capture your site for inclusion in our Legal Blogs Web Archive and may also include it in any future collections. If 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 URL.

Our Web archives related to government and law are important because they contribute to the historical record of national events, 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. For more information about our Web Archive collections please visit our Web site at (http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/).

If you have questions, comments or recommendations concerning the Legal Blogs Archive project,please e-mail the Library's Web Capture team at webcapture@loc.gov at your earliest convenience. For more information about other Web Archive collections please visit http://www.loc.gov/webcapture

Thank You,

Web Capture Team Library of Congress Washington, D.C. webcapture@loc.gov http://www.loc.gov/webcapture

———- LC Reference: Legal Blogs 90311 CD

What a great idea. I'm delighted to be a (tiny) part of it.