Collection Overview

National Government Statistical Web Sites is a selective collection of approximately 200 sites archived since June 2006. Statistical agencies from countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Oceania, South Asia, andSoutheast Asia are included. The sites may contain data, reports, statistical yearbooks and other publications, press releases, methodological guides, and other information of continuing interest to social scientists and historians.

Citing Web Sites in the Archive

Please cite collections as follows:

Title of Collection. Archived by the Indiana University Libraries Web Archive at [URL]. <accessed [date]>

e.g.,

National Government Statistical Web Sites. Archived by the Indiana University Libraries Web Archive at
http://www.archive-it.org/collections/317. <accessed 14 December 2006>

Please cite individual seeds or web pages as follows:

"Title of web page." Title of Collection. Archived by the Indiana University Libraries Web Archive at [URL]. <accessed [date]>

e.g.,

"Statistics South Africa, Census 2001, Census 2001 at a glance." National Government Statistical Web Sites. Archived by the Indiana University Libraries Web Archive at http://wayback.archive-it.org/317/20060610194419/www.statssa.gov.za/census01/html/default.asp <accessed 14 December 2006>

Selection Criteria

Scope: Approximately 200 countries maintain statistical web sites. Those selected for archiving in the Indiana University Libraries Web Archive were chosen because they are national level web sites of interest to IU students and researchers.

Regions largely excluded because archival efforts are ongoing elsewhere are North America and Western Europe.

Technical issues such as the presence of filters or response time from sites have also influenced the selection of particular sites, or their retention over time. The list of sites may change over time to reflect changing conditions on the World Wide Web.

Volume: Seventy to two hundred seeds are captured in each crawl.

Crawl Parameters:

  • Collection Dates: Crawls began in June, 2006.
  • How often captured: After an initial test period, sites are scheduled to be harvested annually.

Acquisition Parameters:

  • Depth: The complete web site, if possible.
  • Breadth: Links are followed out to one external level.

Searching

Archive-It provides full text search capability for all public collections. Alternately, if you know the site you are looking for, enter the URL into the search box, and Archive-It will search for instances of that archived URL.

Archive-It release 2.12 added a link for accessing videos.

Some hints on searching:

  • Generally, search results are ranked by relevance according to several factors:
    • how often the query terms appear in the page relative to how often they appear throughout the collection
    • how often the query terms appear in the page compared to the length of the page
    • whether the query terms appear in the URL
    • whether the query terms appear in the hostname
  • The Boolean search default is AND.
  • If you want to find out about a topic discussed specifically on an archived web site, you can limit your search by adding site:[URL of archived site] to your search terms.
    • e.g., population clock site:www.stats.govt.nz/ will find instances of the term population clock on the New Zealand government’s statistical web site. Malaysia population clock site:www.statistics.gov.my/ will find mentions of a population clock for Malaysia on the Malaysian statistics site.
  • You can refine search results in the following ways:
    • The link to other versions will take you to a list of archived versions that were captured on different dates.
    • The more from... link will take you to other hits from that host.

Since the Indiana University Libraries have been archiving web sites only since spring 2006, you may wish to look for earlier versions of many of the sites in the Library's collections through the Internet Archive's general Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine, however, is not text searchable; you must know the URL of the site that you would like to view.

External Web Archives

Governments of Countries in Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania are actively archiving web sites. See the list of members of netpreserve.org international internet preservation consortium.

Return to Government Information, Maps, and Microform Services.

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