  This article addresses a problem in the electronic government discipline with
special interest in Mexico: the need for a concentrated and updated information
source about municipal e-government websites. One reason for this is the lack
of a complete and updated database containing the electronic addresses (web
domain names) of the municipal governments having a website. Due to diverse
causes, not all the Mexican municipalities have one, and a number of those
having it do not present information corresponding to the current governments
but, instead, to other previous ones. The scarce official lists of municipal
websites are not updated with the sufficient frequency, and manually
determining which municipalities have an operating and valid website in a given
moment is a time-consuming process. Besides, website contents do not always
comply with legal requirements and are considerably heterogeneous. In turn, the
evolution development level of municipal websites is valuable information that
can be harnessed for diverse theoretical and practical purposes in the public
administration field. Obtaining all these pieces of information requires
website content analysis. Therefore, this article investigates the need for and
the feasibility to automate implementation and updating of a digital repository
to perform diverse analyses of these websites. Its technological feasibility is
addressed by means of a literature review about web scraping and by proposing a
preliminary manual methodology. This takes into account known, proven,
techniques and software tools for web crawling and scraping. No new techniques
for crawling or scraping are proposed because the existing ones satisfy the
current needs. Finally, software requirements are specified in order to
automate the creation, updating, indexing, and analyses of the repository.
