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Web-at-risk: preserving govt and political information
Valerie Glenn, University of Alabama Libraries nee University of North Texas, has an article out in the current First Monday entitled, "Preserving Government and Political Information: The Web–at–Risk Project" that talks about ... wait for it ... Web harvesting! It's based on her talk at 2007 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World. In fact the whole issue of First Monday 12(7) is dedicated to selected papers from the WebWise. Valerie's article the what and why of Web harvesting, gives some sample collections, tools, and services and talks a little about some of the overarching issues involved in Web harvesting. There's more information on the Web-at-risk wiki. Besides Valerie's article, there are podcasts of all of the sessions from WebWise07 where you'll hear the likes of Liz Bishoff, Günter Waibel, Steve Puglia, Deanna B. Marcum etc. And if you haven't heard of First Monday you owe it to yourself to get over to that link and check out all their past issues. Or look at Best Mondays, their most read -- or at least most accessed -- articles. Continue reading
OSTI using Archive-It for E-Prints
The Energy Department's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is using the Internet Archive's Archive-It service to "provide uninterrupted access to more than a million online research papers from OSTI's E-print Network."
- EPrint Network Special Collection
This collection provides searching of more than 1 million scientific e-prints. The E-print Network is a deep Web source of scientific and technical information created by researchers active in a wide range of fields, including chemistry, biology and life sciences, materials science, nuclear sciences and engineering, energy research, and computer and information technologies. Information customers can use E-print Network to browse scientific Web sites, find scientific societies, receive alerts and search and access scientific e-prints, the documents circulated electronically to facilitate peer exchange and scientific advancement. OSTI leads development and adaptation of new capabilities for preservation and dissemination of research important to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
"Without a way to periodically archive this material, important science content within this ever-growing, ever-changing online, e-print environment could disappear," said Walter Warnick, director of OSTI.Continue reading
When one copy is not enough…
When the University of Illinois Library joined others in the Google Book Search Library Project, one thing the librarians there knew was that relying on a single digital repository would not fit their preservation or access needs.
The libraries are taking a long-term view on the preservation and availability of the newly digitized materials, too. Rather than leaving the storage to Google alone, as some partners have done, they're creating at least one, and probably two, shared digital repositories of their own to archive and manage the information and content to be added in the future. The idea is that if Google disappears, or changes its business, the information will remain accessible with no hassles. "We know we'll be here," Sandler [Mark Sandler, the director of the committee's Center for Library Initiatives] said.See: Google partnership will help preserve UI collection, by Greg Kline, The [Champaign-Urbana and East Central Illinois] News-Gazette, Sunday, June 17, 2007. Continue reading
Lost webpages?
CBS reported that the Alabama Department of Homeland Security has a website that listed groups they consider possible terrorists. However, after the agency received complaints from people, some Web pages were removed from the list. The original list of the groups that the agency considered possible terrorists were:
- Environmentalists
- Anti-Genetics (those opposed to genetically-altered crops)
- Animal Rights
- Anti-Abortion
- Anti-Nuclear
- Anti-War
- Pro-Gay Right
BPE 2007 – File Formats and Preservation
At Best Practices Exchange 2007, there was much talk about appropriate file formats for preservation. I brought this up during my presentation on LOCKSS and there was general agreement about how we need open, non-proprietary formats to have any real chance of doing long-term digital preservation. Some states, including Oregon are converting documents they receive into more open formats like HTML and PDF. Oregon even has an automated tool for doing so, but more about that in another posting. Glen McAninch of the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives gave a presentation specifically on this topic, called Format Issues in Digital Preservation. His slides will hopefully show up on the schedule page in the next few weeks. Glen described Florida's work in providing "risk assessment" information to state agencies about different kinds of file formats. They take several factors into account - open vs. closed, current market share, existence of current conversion tools, etc. After describing Florida's work, Glen suggested that Kentucky might go down a similar path. It looked useful, but I couldn't find a link to the Florida document to share with you. There are some snippets from the Florida document in Glen's presentation, which will hopefully be posted soon. While not mentioned at the Exchange, two good sources for information about file formats and their link to digital preservation are the PRONOM Registry of file format documentation and the File Formats Blog. Continue reading
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