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Internet preservation: what do we do now?

I’m at the International Internet Preservation Consortium General Assembly and Conference this week in beautiful Reykjavik, Iceland. Follow the flow of the conversation from the #IIPCga16 and #IIPCwac16 twitter hashtags.

Here are a few pieces of the week that have especially hit me as important:

  • The technologies and tools to collect, preserve and use Web archives are technically challenging, but getting better every day. The twitter stream includes MANY links to great tools and use cases for Web archives. I really appreciated British Library’s Andy Jackson’s presentation about his work “Building tools to archive the modern Web”, Brewster Kahle’s “Distributed Web” proposal, Harvard Library’s “Web archiving environmental scan”, but there’s a lot of amazing work going on in this space!
  • 30 national libraries are crawling and preserving their own domains. Government information is of great interest, and many countries have legal deposit laws that put them on sound legal footing to collect and preserve their countries’ Web content.
  • The US .gov/.mil End of term crawl 2016 is coming up quickly and we’re making plans. There will again be a link recommendation tool and perhaps other non-technical ways for the community to help.
  • Despite the great tools and very smart technologists, this group could really use input from subject/domain specialists. We’re the ones who have the specialized knowledge to know what to collect. It’s clear in my mind that the world needs MORE govt information librarians, not less! I highly recommend attending IIPC next year in Lisbon, Portugal (I’ll be there I hope!!) or in the future if the conference is in a city near you.

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