Help FAQ - About the CyberCemetery

If your agency or commission is closing, please make sure your website's valuable information is preserved! Simply contact GPO (or the UNT Libraries, at govinfo@unt.edu) with the following information:

• The agency or commission website URL.

• Closing date for the agency/commission (month and year are fine).

• A contact person's name, email, and phone (this could be any staff member, or a webmaster).

• If the website is database-driven or contains dynamically-created content, please let us know (if you're not sure, that's okay we'll check for this before we archive it).

No, this service is free.

The website will be permanently preserved; UNT has an agreement with GPO and NARA to permanently provide access to this content.

You send us the URL, date your agency or commission is closing, and information for a contact person. We use that information to schedule a time to archive your website, perform a quality-assurance check of the archived version before it goes live, and upload it for public viewing when your agency or commission closes.

Not if you don't want to. If you'd like to help us check the archived version to be sure the web harvest is complete before it goes live, you are welcome to do so—simply let us know. Otherwise, we will make the archived version live at the time you listed for your agency or commission closure.

Not unless you create a re-direct yourself and pre-pay for your domain registration for a specific amount of time. This is of course a great service for the public: providing a clear transition to the archived version. However, if you choose not to use this option, be assured that search engines like Google usually place the UNT archived version of the website very high in results quite quickly after an agency or commission closes.

If the link is broken because of the original code in the page or a dead external link, we cannot edit this. Our agreement with NARA and GPO is clear that we cannot alter the original content of archived websites in the CyberCemetery.

We archive and display the websites using Heritrix, which is what the Internet Archive uses to produce the "Wayback Machine." This means that we cannot alter code to hide contact pages, but there is a message at the top of each page indicating that the website is archived and no longer live ("External links, forms, and search boxes may not function within this collection"). This message also includes the original URL and the date it was archived.

For an example, see the top of our archived version of the US-Canada Power System Outage Task Force.

The URLs are based on the website's original URL, our CyberCemetery server address, and the date the website was archived. For an example, see our archived version of the US-Canada Power System Outage Task Force: http://cybercemetery.unt.edu/archive/energyreport/20090701154100/https://reports.energy.gov/.

Go to the CyberCemetery collection within the UNT Digital Library. Choose "At a Glance" or "Explore Holdings" from the left sidebar, and then click any links that interest you.