Library of Congress Archives IJ.org

The Institute for Justice is pleased to announce that the U.S. Library of Congress has selected our IJ.org website for inclusion in the library’s historic collection of Internet materials related to public policy topics. Inclusion of IJ’s material demonstrates that the Library of Congress considers our website to be an important part of this collection and the historical record.

The Library of Congress preserves the nation’s cultural artifacts and provides enduring access to them. The library’s traditional functions—acquiring, cataloging, preserving and providing collection materials of historical importance to Congress and the American people to foster education and scholarship—now extends to digital materials, including websites.

As a representative of the Library of Congress conveyed to IJ, “[The Library’s] web archives are important because they contribute to the historical record, 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.”

Now that the Library of Congress is gathering IJ’s material for use by our nation’s lawmakers, let’s hope those same lawmakers themselves understand once and for all that their powers are limited and that constitutional rights must be respected—two messages regularly and clearly stated on IJ.org and in all of our other work.