Today’s post is authored by Nicole Greenhouse, Web Archivist in Archival Collections Management. 

NYU Special Collections, specifically the Tamiment Library, has been web archiving since 2007. As part of the NYU Votes campaign, I thought it would be fun to highlight some of our holdings regarding get out the vote efforts from the websites in our historical web archives! Although many of these websites are not crawled anymore or do not exist on the live web, the technology we used in 2007-2009 was not as discriminating as what we use today, so there are a lot more websites that we unintentionally crawled. Here are some examples:

PFLAG worked to get out the vote and educate allies to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people on voter registration for the 2008 election.Get Out the Vote with PFLAG! Webpage; November 10, 2009; Tamiment-Wagner: Feminism and Women’s Movements Web Archive; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6344/20091110170449/http://community.pflag.org/Page.aspx?pid=421; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 

Labor unions also used their websites to inform their membership of voting, here are two examples, the first is from the homepage of the CWA’s New Jersey local highlighting registration and their vote by mail laws. The other is from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters website about the history of their DRIVE (Democratic, Republican, Independent Voter Education) program.

CWA New Jersey Homepage; September 9, 2009; Tamiment-Wagner: Labor Unions and Organizations (U.S.) Web Archive; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6349/20090903121847/http://www.cwanj.org/; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 

Teamsters and DRIVE Webpage; February 9, 2013; Tamiment-Wagner: Labor Unions and Organizations (U.S.) Web Archive; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6349/20130209090559/http://www.teamster.org/history/teamster-history/drive; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. 

Student PIRGs (Public Interest Research Group) launched New Voters Project to bring young voters to the polls. Their homepage features dispatches from campuses on their voter turnout from Election Day. Although the post is undated, it is likely from the 2008 Election based on when it was crawled.

Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project Homepage; March 23, 2009; Tamiment-Wagner: Anarchism Web Archive; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6335/20090323124615/http://www.newvotersproject.org/; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

United for Peace and Justice had an elections resources page, providing descriptions and links to organizations focused on protecting fair elections in the United States.

United for Peace and Justice Election Protection Resources Webpage; March 19, 2009; Tamiment-Wagner: Other Left Activism Web Archive; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6351/20090319173958/http://www.unitedforpeace.org//article.php?id=3423; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

I also wanted to highlight an unsuccessful capture of a website that is focused on voting. Tamiment attempted to capture the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) website (before the controversy in 2009), but as you can see from the web capture, it only captured text and is clearly missing layout and images embedded in the website. In 2009, we did not have as many tools for patching poor quality captures. Although today I cannot tell you why the website did not capture in its entirety, you can still learn about the organization’s success registering 1.3 million voters for the 2008 elections through the crawls.

ACORN New Voters at the Polls Webpage; September 11, 2009; Other Left Activism Web Archive; https://wayback.archive-it.org/6351/20090911233558/http://www.acorn.org/M/typo3temp/index.php?id=17705; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.

To surf these pages and the web archives as you would live web, click on the Wayback links in the citations. To view NYU’s public web archives, please visit our Archive-it homepage. You can also search for archived webpages in our catalog in context with the rest of the collections. Don’t forget to vote November 3!