Joanne Archer University of Maryland Kate Odell ArchiveIt

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

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 Monitor along the way Determine crawling approach Determine permissions approach Identify services and tools to use 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!

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

Collection Development: Technical Flash Storage Languages Copyright Javascript Databases Technical considerations Hidden content Social Multiple media 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_Web. Archives_Policy. pdf – National Library of Ireland general election 2011 web archive • http: //www. nli. ie/Get. Attachment. aspx? id=8 f 6 b 68 db-e 19 c-411 c-b 041 -aa 8 b 741 d 2 e 10

Tools: HTTrack

Tools: HTTrack

Tools: In-House Program Web Curator Tool

Tools: In-House Program Digi. Board

Tools: Subscriptions, Web Archiving Service

Tools: Subscriptions, Archive-It

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

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 World. Cat 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: //lcweb 2. loc. gov/diglib/lcwa/html/lcwa-home. html

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

CLIO Record (public view)

Worldcat 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/USWeb. Archiving The survey will close October 31, 2011.

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Joanne Archer • jarcher@umd. edu Tessa Fallon • taf 2111@columbia. edu Abbie Grotke • abgr@loc. gov Kate Odell • kate@archive. org