Information for WAS Curators

Curator Tools: Help for Building Archives

WAS archives are open to all to search and display, but with a subscription you can build your own unique archives.

If you're new to using WAS to create archives, if you would like some reminders, or if you're just considering building an archive, these videos and guides will help you understand web archiving in more detail.

Collection Planning

Libraries using the Web Archiving Service may wish to use more traditional collection planning practices to plan their archives. Collection plans are entirely optional, but may help you define the scope of your archives.

	WAS Collection Planning Guidelines Outlines the issues to consider as you prepare to build a new web archive. This document is intended to help each institution plan its web archiving activity.
	WAS Collection Plan Forms These forms are available to help you prepare your collection plans.

Rights Management

Copyright issues in Web archiving are still evolving, though some very helpful recommendations have been proposed by the Section 108 Study Group. The Web Archiving Service honors an opt-out policy and uses the Section 108 Study Group recommendations to guide rights management practices.

WAS Rights Management Practices This guide provides an overview of the Section 108 Recommendations for web archiving. It provides an "at-a-glance" review of rights management issues and outlines rights management features in WAS.

Robots Permission Request Template Webmasters can place rules called "robots.txt" files that can prevent crawlers from capturing their sites effectively. The Web Archiving Service honors these rules, but webmasters can update them to permit our crawlers to capture. If you need to communicate with a webmaster or site owner, this template provides the instructions for updating that file. This information is also available on our Webmasters page.

Using the Web Archiving Service: Curator Features

	Web Archiving Service User Guide A complete overview of how to use the Web Archiving Service to capture web sites.
	Create and Capture Sites Length: 10 min. This video shows the basics of capturing a web site with WAS, including an overview of the different capture settings you can use to tailor your capture. Also covered: the WAS Bookmarklet feature for adding sites to WAS while you browse, how to tell the status of captures in progress, and how to stop captures.
	Display and Analyze Capture Results Length: 10 min. After you capture a site with WAS, you'll be able to review capture statistics, and search and display the results. This video shows you the tools WAS provides for evaluating capture results including the ability to compare captures of the same site on different dates. The video also covers the RSS feed feature and shows how captured multimedia content displays in the archive.

WAS Administration Features

The Web Archiving Service includes tools to help you manage your archives and users.

	WAS Institution Administrator Guide Information for administrative users of WAS. Learn how to add new projects, invite new users and generate activity reports.
	WAS Project Administrator Guide Information for WAS curators with project administrator permissions. Includes details on how to invite new users to your project and how to configure your project for public access.

Other Tools for the Web Archivist