Towards a cultural history of web archiving

[UPDATE: this article is now published; see the free pre-print version here.]

This week I’m writing the first draft of a chapter on the cultural history of web archiving, for a forthcoming volume of essays (details here). It is subject to peer review and so isn’t yet certain to be published, but here’s the abstract.

I should welcome comments very much, and there may also be a short opportunity for open online peer review.

Users, technologies, organisations: towards a cultural history of world web archiving

‘As systematic archiving of the World Wide Web approaches its twentieth anniversary, the time is ripe for an initial historical assessment of the patterns in which web archiving has fallen. The scene is characterised by a highly asymmetric pattern, involving a single global organisation, the Internet Archive, alongside a growing number of national memory institutions, many of which are affiliated to the International Internet Preservation Consortium. Many other organisations also engage in archiving the web, including universities and other institutions in the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector. Alongside these is a proliferation of private sector providers of web archiving services, and a small but highly diverse group of individuals acting on their own behalf. The evolution of this ecosystem, and the consequences of that evolution, are ripe for investigation.

‘Employing evidence derived from interviews and from published sources, the paper sets out to document at length for the first time the development of the sector in its institutional and cultural aspects. In particular it considers how the relationship between archiving organisations and their stakeholders has played out in different circumstances. How have the needs of the archives themselves and their internal stakeholders and external funders interacted with the needs of the scholarly end users of the archived web? Has web archiving been driven by the evolution of the technologies used to carry it out, the internal imperatives of the organisations involved, or by the needs of the end user?

3 thoughts on “Towards a cultural history of web archiving

  1. Francesca Ortolano (@OrtFrancesca) April 13, 2016 / 10:27 am

    I’m waiting to read the whole article. I hope you would especially investigate which strategies and policies to deliver information and make it available to users have been developed over this twenty years; how many attention has been directed to the needs of users, and if global institutions have had different approaches to the issue than ones of national projects and cultural institutes. The relation between archives and their users is one of my primary interests, of course.
    NB My capability to read English is better than my capability to write!

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