Home » Posts tagged 'Web archiving' (Page 4)
Tag Archives: Web archiving
Archiving the Web
A new article in Times Higher Education (THE), calls attention to the need for archiving the web and the difficulties of doing it.
- Memory failure detected, Times Higher Education, (Sept. 1, 2011). "We are taking it for granted that such material will be there, but we need to be attentive. We have a responsibility to future generations of researchers." ...While libraries are currently digitising 19th-century documents and making them available via the web, it is "deeply ironic" that websites from two years ago are being made less accessible, Meyer notes.
- Meyer, Eric T., Thomas, Arthur and Schroeder, Ralph, Web Archives: The Future(s) (June 30, 2011). In this report, the authors consider the possible future uses of web archives. This report is structured first, to engage in some speculative thought about the possible futures of the web as an exercise in prompting us to think about what we need to do now in order to make sure that we can reliably and fruitfully use archives of the web in the future. Next, we turn to considering the methods and tools being used to research the live web, as a pointer to the types of things that can be developed to help understand the archived web. Then, we turn to a series of topics and questions that researchers want or may want to address using the archived web. In this final section, we tentatively identify some of the short, medium and long term challenges individuals, organizations, and international bodies can target to increase our ability to explore these topics and answer these questions.
Extending Collection Development to Web Archives
This isn't new information, but I don't think we've mentioned it here before. UNT, one of the participants in the End-of-Term Web Archive project (EOT), which aimed to capture the entirety of the federal government's public Web presence before and after the 2009 change in presidential administrations, is hosting a project to investigate innovative solutions to issues around web archives. The issues include being able to to identify and select materials in accord with collection development policies and being able to characterize archived materials using common metrics in order to communicate the scope and value of these materials to administrators. The project will use 10 librarian Subject Matter Experts who will classify the EOT collection according to the Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) Classification System. The project will also develop a set of metrics to enable characterization of materials in Web archives in units of measurement familiar to libraries and their administrations.
- Classification of the End-of-Term Archive: Extending Collection Development to Web Archives, University of North Texas Libraries (21 April 2011).
- End-of-Term Web Archive
Archiving of End of Term of Bush Administration
A description of the collaborative project that archived the web pages of the George W. Bush presidential administration at the end of its term in office.
- The “End of Term” Was Only the Beginning, by Laura Graham, a Digital Media Project Coordinator at the Library of Congress, The Signal, Digital Preservation Blog, Library of Congress, (July 26th, 2011). In late 2008, the Library of Congress, the California Digital Library, the University of North Texas, the Internet Archive and the Government Printing Office began the first collaborative project to capture and archive United States government web sites representing the “end of term” of the George W. Bush presidential administration. The partners planned, strategized, developed tools to facilitate processes and settled on a division of responsibilities. Months later, when the crawling of content was complete, there were 5.7 terabytes at CDL, 1 at UNT and 9.1 at Internet Archive, for a total of 15.9 terabytes.
Alaska State Library Archiving Governor Palin’s Resignation Announcement and End of Term Website
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s resignation announcement earlier this month and the transition of power to Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell gave the Alaska State Library a great chance to preserve this "at risk" content. Using Archive-It and the manual "start on demand" feature inside the web application the Alaska State Library crawled Governor Palin and Lt. Governor Parnell's web sites on the eve of the transition of power and was able to capture valuable information that is now offline and no longer accessible. The Alaska State Library’s Alaska Governor/Lt. Governor Web Sites collection was originally conceived to archive these government websites over time. Once Sarah Palin left office, the governor’s website changed to reflect Sean Parnell as governor, and the lieutenant governor’s website changed to reflect Craig Campbell as lieutenant governor. Thus all of the information on former Governor Palin’s website as well as speeches and press releases from Sean Parnell’s time as lieutenant governor are no longer available on the live web. The foresight of the staff of the Alaska State Library and the availability of the Archive-It web archiving service made it possible to preserve the final changes to these "at risk" websites before they were taken offline. Continue reading
Poison Pill for Government Web-Site Archivists?
What would happen if projects such as the California Digital Library's project to preserve online government materials were stifled by copyright law?
The CDL project and similar ones could be endangered by aggressive enforcement of copyright law because many government web sites contain copyrighted material.
Now that the Internet Archive is being sued by a healthcare company that says the Internet Archive illegally stored copies of copyrighted materials (Keeper of Expired Web Pages Is Sued Because Archive Was Used in Another Suit By TOM ZELLER Jr. New York Times, July 13, 2005) we cannot help but wonder if similar copyright infringement suits will hurt efforts to preserve government web sites. Continue reading
Latest Comments