Website
The Website series consists of two website captures July 23, 2000 (2,193 digital records, 52.1 MB) and April 24, 2009, (91,911 digital files, 708 digital folders).
The July 23, 2000 website capture, transferred via File Transfer Protocol, is comprised of the entire contents of the Solar Car Team website as they appeared on the transfer date. The website includes HTML files, image files, PDF files of newsletters, and four RealAudio files. The original organization and structure of the online files has been preserved in the archived website. Content of links external to the University of Michigan has not been included in the website subseries, though a citation to the original Universal Resource Locator (URL) can be found within the content of the digital records.
The website includes information for public dissemination on Solar Car teams, sponsors, and races. Six of the Solar Car Teams are represented in the website: Sunrunner, Maize & Blue, Solar Vision, Wolverine, MaizeBlaze, and MPulse. Though documentation is available in varying degrees for each team, most team pages include information on the team members, the technical specifications for that team's car, team sponsors, and an extensive collection of photographs of races and events in which the team participated. Of particular interest are the pages for the MaizeBlaze team, which include audio and journal accounts from race team members for the team's entry in the World Solar Challenge.
The website also includes year-by-year information on the Solar Car Team's participation in two major races, the GM Sunrayce and the World Solar Challenge, information for visitors about building solar cars and sponsoring the team, and issues of the team's monthly newsletter. A large number of thumbnail and full-size digitized photographs and digital images, mainly of team members and team activities, are also included.
The Website 2006-2009 subseries features a snapshot of the Solar Car Team's website (http://solarcar.engin.umich.edu/). The website snapshot was harvested by the University Archives staff in April 2009 using the software HTTrack website copier downloaded from: http://www.httrack.com/. The website includes information on the current solar car Infinium (2009). The website is divided into news, sponsors, recruitment information, about us, donation information, and multimedia sections. Information regarding past teams and cars is small. The multimedia section features photographs from 2006 to present of the team, races, and cars. The website is in Drupal; an open source software package freely available for publishing, managing, and organizing a website (http://drupal.org). Blogs are heavily used on the website and the different sections are posted to in a blog format, chronologically from the top down.