Joanne Archer University of Maryland Kate Odell Archive-It Abbie Grotke Library of Congress Tessa Fallon Columbia University Creating and Maintaining Web Archives

Session Goals Provide an overview of web archiving and the tasks involved Discuss workflow management and copyright issues Talk about collection strategies and collection development for web archives Analyze the different options for web archiving Discuss some of the commonly encountered technical challenges and problems Examine methods of access and description

What is web archiving? Web Archiving is the capture, management, and preservation of websites and web resources.

Web Archiving Initiatives Prominent Web Archiving Initiatives include: Internet Archive International Internet Preservation Consortium Large National Libraries: –Australia –United Kingdom –United States –Denmark Web at Risk Project

Workflow Management Resource planning Determine crawling approach Identify services and tools to use Collection development and planning Determine permissions approach Monitor along the way Access for researchers

– Legal deposit requirement only applies to “published works” (§ 407)§ 407 –§ 108 of the Copyright Act provides library exceptions but doesn’t address digital preservation and web archiving§ 108 –Varying approaches taken: Crawl permissions Access permissions Notification of crawling Respecting robots.txt (or not!) –Risk and web archiving policies should be determined by each institution - talk to your lawyers! Copyright/Permissions

Collection Strategies Whole Domain used by some national libraries and by the Internet Archive. -- capture everything within a geographic domain such as in the case of Sweden, all sites within the.se domain. Selective Archiving capture certain portions of the web based on predefined criteria or collection policies. Thematic event driven (September 11) or theme driven (human rights) deposit Combination

Collection Development: Topical Distributed Survey Nomination Targeted Domain Nomination forms Delicious social bookmarks Survey/forms Bookmarklet Subject/general Project-specific Collaborative Institutional history Event-specific Data set Finite/Ongoing Active/Inactive Public Organization Academic Subject specialists Curators Collaborators SCOPEFOCUS SELECTION TOOLS

Collection Development: Technical Technical considerations FlashJavascriptDatabases Hidden content Multiple domains Social media CopyrightLanguagesStorage

Collection Development Policies or Similar Documents: –Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research, Human Rights Web Archive –Library of Congress –Tamiment Library Web Archive – University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library –National Library of Ireland general election 2011 web archive Collection Development Policies/Guidelines

Tools: HTTrack

Tools: In-House Program Web Curator Tool

Tools: In-House Program DigiBoard

Tools: Subscriptions, Web Archiving Service

Tools: Subscriptions, Archive-It

How does web archiving work? Curator Selects Websites (Seeds) to Archive Curator Specifies Scope (how much of the websites are archived) Archived content is processed and stored (.warc format) Crawler visits seed sites and archives the Urls that are discovered (following the scoping rules) Seeds and scoping are sent to the Crawler (usually Heritrix) Access tools (Wayback) allow archived content to be viewed and browse

Quality Review Quality Review is different for everyone. Why? The tool(s) being used for harvesting and access Your institution’s goals, needs, and preferences How much time you have Review Reports Were there any blocked content or unreachable sites? Did you get more content than expected? Less? Review Archived Web Pages Some issues can only be found with the human eye (for now!) Was look-and-feel properly captured? Make Desired Changes Scoping, Seeds, Crawl Settings, etc. Crawl Again

Some web technologies can be tricky (though not impossible!) to capture or to view in the archived version: Database driven sites Javascript (only sometimes) Flash (only sometimes) Certain video formats Websites change – what archived perfectly yesterday, might not after today’s redesign Common Problems – “The Web is a Mess”

Access Options: Subscription Service Access Page (i.e. Archive-It website) Website of Your Organization or Project (i.e. Human Rights Web Portal, LOC’s Web Archives site) OPAC (i.e. Columbia’s CLIO) OCLC’s WorldCat Examples of Description: Columbia University Dublin Core MARC Internet Resource Cataloging Request (IRCR) Library of Congress Creates MODS records for each “site” Collection level records in MARC (for the OPAC) Archive-It Dublin Core Coming soon: Automated transformation to MARC, MODS, and more. Access and Description

Archive-It Partner Page

Library of Congress Web Archives Page

Library of Virginia

CLIO Record (public view)

Worldcat Link back to the Archive-It collection

Staff needed include: Project Management Selectors/Curators Technical staff for Seed URL preparation (scoping), Quality Review, analysis of reports, etc. Catalogers Training for Staff: Use of Tools Selection - and how what can and cannot archive affects that Permissions Quality Review Helpful skills: comfortable with web (not all are, in our experience!), flexibility, good sense of humor Staffing

Is there web content within your collection scope? –Your organization’s website(s) –Print material that has migrated to web publication –Subject related websites –Websites related to manuscript or archival collections –State or local government websites Research and talk to similar organizations Talk to subscription services about trial accounts Try out some of the lower barrier tools (i.e. HTTrack) Get involved with collaborative web archiving efforts Just do it! Jump in! Taking the First Steps…

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Content Working Group [ ] is sponsoring this survey of organizations in the United States who are actively involved in or planning to archive content from the web. The survey will close October 31, NDSA Web Archiving Survey

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Joanne Archer Tessa Fallon Abbie Grotke Kate Odell