In April 2012 Paul got involved in the rescue of the Feautor archives. That exposure to web archiving raised the question of whether something similar might be done for older ELCA sites. This is an exploration of that question.
There are two different approaches to web archiving that I have used with sites in the past. The more fundamentally archival approach was developed as part of the Documenting Internet2 project at the University of Minnesota using the Heritrix crawler from the Internet Archive. However, implementing this method requires a greater infrastructure commitment over a long period, so a quicker and dirtier method using simpler web crawlers and a bit of JavaScript is also possible.
Please review the considerations of web archiving page for some important background and context. Once you've done that, take a look at my proposal for the ELCA to see one set of options for moving forward.