RECORDS MANAGEMENT AND THE WEB Presented by Jennifer Wright, Archives and Information Management Team and Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, Electronic Records Division Smithsonian Institution Archives August 6, 2009

Goals of the presentation  Introduce the role of Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) as well as its Records Management Services  Describe the Processes and Plans for Website and Web 2.0 Acquisitions and Preservation  Discuss Plans for Communicating About Websites and Web 2.0 with SIA  Answer Questions

SIA’s mission  Appraise, acquire and preserve records documenting the history and activities of the Institution  Offer a range of reference, research, and records services  Create products and services which promote understanding of the Smithsonian and its history

SIA’s authority – SD 501  “All documents created or received by employees of SI in the course of official business are records of the Institution, and none may be disposed of except in accord [with guidelines] established by the Smithsonian Archives.”

Records management services  Help identify what to keep and what to discard  Create records disposition schedules  Maintain, preserve, and provide access to records  Destroy records according to established schedules Archives and Information Management (AIM) Team specializes in assessing the long-term value of records. Electronic Records Division (ERD) specializes in transferring electronic records and their long-term preservation and accessibility.

What is a record?  Any official recorded information, regardless of medium or characteristics, created, received, and maintained by a Smithsonian museum, office, or employee  Records may be in paper, electronic, photographic, or audiovisual formats and include:  Websites  Web 2.0 tools and applications (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SharePoint, etc.)  Documentation of websites and their development  Web traffic statistics (OCIO is responsible for permanent record)

Appraising website records  Most SI websites will be appraised as permanent records:  Full baseline  Notify SIA of significant changes or additions  Some web 2.0 applications will be appraised as permanent records and others will be appraised as temporary:  Full baseline of most to document that they existed  Content will be appraised for unique research value  Determine frequency of captures

SIA and electronic records

STRI website in 1995 SIA Accession

STRI website, 1998 from the Internet Archive

CFCH Mekong Lifeways, 2004 SIA Accession

Past web archiving procedures Files transferred from OCIO HTTrack web crawler Scripts used to create XHTML preservation files but very manual and time-consuming

Heritrix Archival web crawler Open source Java Developed by Internet Archive, National Library of Norway and National and University Library of Iceland

WARC WARC – Web ARChive file format  Now international standard – ISO 28500:2009  Extension of the ARC format in use since 1996  Container format

Next steps  Contact SIA when launching a new or significantly revised website, portion of a website, or web 2.0  Due to the fragility of digital records, it is better to capture websites when they are created, not when they are retired  Contact SIA when retiring a website in case it has not been previously captured  AIM Team will contact each webmaster during the next year to discuss existing websites and web 2.0

AIM and ERD teams work together  Ultimate goal is long-term preservation of and access to official records whether in non-digital or digital formats  Records are appraised based on their content, not the media

Contacts and resources  Jennifer Wright, Archives and Information Management Team, ,  Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, Electronic Records Division, ,  Smithsonian Institution Archives website: