Web Archives: yesterday's web; today's archives

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Site Registry for the Web Archiving Service

March 18, 2010

Over 20 organizations are now using the Web Archiving Service to capture and archive Web sites. These organizations include the University of California libraries, other UC units and organizations beyond the UC. Web archivists have told us that they want to see a collection-planning tool that will let them see what sites other organizations are collecting, or if a particular site is already being archived.

In response to that request, the Web Archiving Service now includes the WAS Site Registry. This feature is now available to people with WAS accounts, either as curators or administrators. The Site Registry will tell curators which websites have been archived by other WAS curators and will provide such as the organization that captured the site, whether the content is public, how many times the site was captured and more. Sites can be looked up either by site name or by URL. While not an access tool, the registry provides important contextual information to support the archivist’s decision-making.

Web Archive for California Water Research

March 05, 2010

Web Archive Discovery: Memento Implementation Meeting

February 04, 2010

On February 2-3, members of the California Digital Library Web archiving team took part in a working meeting of the Memento Project, hosted by the Internet Archive. Led by the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Old Dominion University (ODU), Memento is an NDIIPP-funded project aimed at making Web-archived content more readily discoverable. Rather than expecting people to know about the growing number of Web archives, and to guess which archive might hold an older version of the resource they’re looking for, Memento proposes to make archived content discoverable via the original URL that the searcher already knew about.

This project represents a potentially extraordinary development for Web archivists. As we try to address the Web’s instability on a site-by-site basis, and sometimes even at the document level, there is always the question of just how much people will benefit from our efforts if they don’t know about the archives. The Memento developers are addressing this issue at the fundamental level of how Web servers interact with HTTP protocol, and how information about archives (or an aggregator of archives) may be included there. A similar but narrower application of this principle is already in use by the UK National Archives and British government agencies.

Web Archiving Service: Revised Site

January 22, 2010

On Thursday January 21, the California Digital Library launched a redesigned Web Archiving Service home page: http://was.cdlib.org. The new design integrates information about both web archives and curatorial tools, so that people visiting the site can easily get information about either building or searching web archives. The goal for this redesign is to provide clear information for the range of different people visiting the site, from longstanding curators to researchers to potential future partners.

Some important features of the new site:

Web Archiving Resource: IIPC “Active Solutions”

November 02, 2009

Link for presentations: http://netpreserve.org/events/program.php

The presenters provided a truly international perspective on web archiving issues and included representatives from France, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom. Presentations topics cover metadata issues, strategies for dealing with viruses in web archives, and workflow models. The presentations include specific examples of web archiving innovation, such as the National Archives’ collaborative efforts with UK government agencies to make sure that users who receive 404 errors for government documents are routed directly to the archived copy. (Spencer and Heatherington).

Web Archiving Resource: Library of Congress Video

October 07, 2009

The Library of Congress has prepared a brief video to convey the need for web archiving and to describe web archiving efforts at LC. This video provides a good introduction to the collection, access and technological challenges faced by web archivists. Note that the archiving protocol described, particularly the rights management activity, is specific to the Library of Congress.

Public Access to Web Archiving Service Goes Live

July 08, 2009

By Tracy Seneca, Web Archiving Coordinator

The California Digital Library is pleased to announce public access to its Web Archives. CDL’s Web Archives are built and published using its Web Archiving Service (WAS), which enables librarians to capture, curate, and preserve websites for the benefit of researchers and the general public. New archives are continually being built and published, and will appear along with the current archives available at http://webarchives.cdlib.org/.

Release 1 of the Web Archiving Service

October 12, 2006

The Web-at-Risk, a CDL Digital Preservation Group project, achieved a major milestone with Release 1 of the Web Archiving Service (WAS) to a pilot group of project curators. Development of the WAS marks a crucial step in enabling the libraries to extend their historic collection building role in a web-published world. The Web-at-Risk is three-year effort led by the CDL with the goal of building tools that will enable librarians and archivists to capture, curate and preserve web-based government and political information. The primary collection building focus is federal, state, and local government information, but may include web documents from non-profit and international government sources and also policy documents, campaign literature, and information surrounding local political movements.

The “at-risk” designation refers both to the ephemeral nature of web resources in general and to the particularly unstable nature of government and political resources. Critical publications that libraries once collected in print are now often only available on the web and are vulnerable to disappearing as sites are updated, as government agencies themselves are reorganized or as older file formats become unusable. As the scale of this problem expands with the growth of the web, librarians need a new suite of tools to fulfill their historic mission to preserve our cultural and political heritage.

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