Joanne Archer
University of Maryland
Kate Odell
Archive-It
Abbie Grotke
Library of Congress
Tessa Fallon
Columbia University

• 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

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

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

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

Copyright/Permissions
–
Legal deposit requirement only applies to “published works” ( §
407 )
– § 108 of the Copyright Act provides library exceptions but doesn’t address digital preservation and web archiving
–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!

• 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
• Finite/Ongoing
• Active/Inactive
• Public
• Organization
• Academic
• Subject specialists
• Curators
• Collaborators
SCOPE FOCUS
• Subject/general
• Project-specific
• Collaborative
• Institutional history
• Event-specific
• Data set
• Nomination forms
• Delicious social bookmarks
• Survey/forms
• Email
• Bookmarklet
TOOLS SELECTION
• Distributed
• Survey
• Nomination
• Targeted
• Domain

Collection Development: Technical
Storage
Flash
Javascript
Languages
Technical considerations
Databases
Copyright
Hidden content
Social media
Multiple domains

Collection Development Policies/Guidelines
• Collection Development Policies or Similar Documents:
– Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research, Human Rights Web Archive
• http://library.columbia.edu/indiv/humanrights/hrwa.html
– Library of Congress
• http://www.loc.gov/acq/devpol/webarchive.pdf
– Tamiment Library Web Archive
• http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/tam/webarchive.html
– University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library
• http://bentley.umich.edu/uarphome/webarchives/BHL_WebArchives_Policy.pdf
– National Library of Ireland general election 2011 web archive
• http://www.nli.ie/GetAttachment.aspx?id=8f6b68db-e19c-411c-b041-aa8b741d2e10

Tools: HTTrack

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)
Seeds and scoping are sent to the
Crawler (usually
Heritrix)
Access tools
(Wayback) allow archived content to be viewed and browse
Archived content is processed and stored (.warc format)
Crawler visits seed sites and archives the Urls that are discovered
(following the scoping rules)

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

Common Problems – “The Web is a Mess”
•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

Access and Description
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.

Archive-It Partner Page

Library of Congress Web Archives Page http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/lcwa/html/lcwa-home.html

Library of Virginia http://www.virginiamemory.com/collections/archival_web_collections

Link back to the Archive-It collection http://www.worldcat.org/title/north-africa-the-middle-east-2011/oclc/756767371

Staffing
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

Taking the First Steps…
• 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!

NDSA Web Archiving Survey
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Content Working
Group
[http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/working_groups/content.html
] is sponsoring this survey of organizations in the United States who are actively involved in or planning to archive content from the web.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/USWebArchiving
The survey will close October 31, 2011 .

Joanne Archer • jarcher@umd.edu
Tessa Fallon • taf2111@columbia.edu
Abbie Grotke • abgr@loc.gov
Kate Odell • kate@archive.org