Collection Overview
Citing Resources - Copyright Information
Scope: The United States Election 2008 Web Archive is a selective collection of approximately 2200 sites associated with the Presidential, Congressional, and gubernatorial elections. This archive includes presidential candidate web sites during the presidential primary season. The sites were collected between April 2007 and December 2008. The collection contains sites for presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial candidates, state government, political parties, watchdog, public policy and political advocacy groups, candidate and relevant election blogs, and miscellaneous web sites associated with the 2008 elections.
Candidates increasingly used social media as new avenues of communication with the electorate. Candidate web sites employed Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and wikis. The sites also incorporated methods to raise campaign contributions and to solicit volunteers.
2008 saw the election of the first African-American to the presidency. Senator Barack Obama, (D-Ill.) beat Senator John McCain (R-AZ) by a 53% to 46% margin. Another notable first for the 2008 election was the inclusion of a woman, Sarah Palin (Governor of Alaska), as the Vice-Presidential candidate on the Republican ticket. Democrats increased their majorities in both houses of Congress.
The election took place on November 4, 2008.
The United States Election 2008 Web Archive is part of a continuing effort by the Library’s Web Archiving project Minerva to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve digital materials for future generations of researchers.
Collection Period: April 2007 – December 2008.
Permission is sought to provide offsite access to researchers, and the Library received 918 approvals by web site owners. All archived web sites are available to researchers onsite at the Library of Congress.
Number of Sites: Approximately 2,200 web sites were collected.
Citing Resources in the Web Archive
Citations should indicate: Archived in the Library of Congress Web Archives at www.loc.gov. When citing a particular Web site include the archived Web site's Citation ID (e.g., http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.natlib/mrva1234.1234). Researchers are advised to follow standard citation guidelines for Web sites, pages, and articles. Researchers are reminded that many of the materials in this Web archive are copyrighted and that citations must credit the authors/creators and publishers of the works.
Copyright Information
Many, if not all, of the Web sites in the collection and elements incorporated into the Web sites (e.g., photographs, articles, graphical representations) are protected by copyright. The materials may also be subject to publicity rights, privacy rights, or other legal interests.
Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with the person desiring to use the item. You will need permission from the copyright owners or rights holders for reproduction, distribution, or other use of protected items beyond that allowed by fair use or other statutory exemptions. Researchers should consult the sites themselves for information about rights, contacts, and permissions. The catalog record for each archived Web site contains the specific information about the site known to the Library. See Library of Congress Legal Notices page for additional information and restrictions.
The Library of Congress would like to hear from any copyright owners who are not properly identified on this Web site so that we may make the necessary corrections. In addition, if you are a copyright owner or otherwise have exclusive control over materials presently available through this collection and do not wish your materials to be available through this Web site, please let us know. To make a takedown request, please fill out this form.