Bilgrimage Coverage of Papal Resignation Archived by Library of Congress

A bit of good news I'd like to share with Bilgrimage readers:

Two days ago, I received word from the Library of Congress that its web archiving program has selected Bilgrimage for inclusion in its archive of Internet materials covering the retirement of Pope Benedict. The Library of Congress email to me about this states:

The United States Library of Congress has selected your website for inclusion in the Library’s historic collection of Internet materials related to the retirement of Pope Benedict XVI. We consider your 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 serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including websites. 

And then it adds:

The Library may also make the collection available more broadly by hosting the collection on the Library’s public access website no earlier than one year after our archiving has been completed. The Library hopes that you share its vision of preserving web materials about the retirement of Pope Benedict XVI and permitting researchers from across the world to access them.  

Our 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. For more information about these web archive collections, please visit our website.

And I'm, of course, delighted, and want to share this information with Bilgrimage readers, who are an essential and critically important part of the conversation here, a piece of which has now been archived that includes not only what I've posted, but what you've been saying in your commentary on the papal transition. Thank you!