Brittan Dunham Digital Preservation Howard Besser October 15 ...

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Feb 2, 2013 (4 years and 2 months ago)

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Brittan Dunham

Digital Preservation

Howard Besser

October 15, 2010



The Web
-
at
-
Risk: Preserving Our Nation’s Digital Cultural Heritage



The ease of web publishing, access to information and collaborative
grassroots efforts brought on by the Internet mean
s there is more open discourse
and information available to the public than ever before. Archivists understand that
this wealth of information and points of view can be used to shape our national
identity and compile a historical narrative, but face rapid
technological
advancements and a lack of resources and standards for preserving so much
material. The California Digital Library understood that librarians needed a place to
start, a framework within which they could begin to compile and preserve online
in
formation before the websites and their content were lost or no longer accessible.


The Web
-
at
-
Risk project began in 2005 when the National Digital
Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP) awarded one of its
first grants to the Californ
ia Digital Library and its partners, New York University
and the University of North Texas. The partners hoped to develop “tools to
enable
librarians and archivists to capture, curate, preserve, and provide access to web
-
based government and political info
rmation
.”
1

Additional support
for the project
has come

from Stanford University, the San Diego Supercomputing Center, the
Library of Congress and

staff at several of the

Un
iversity of California library
branches. This group of partners would be part of the

experimental phase of the



1

The
Web
-
At
-
Risk:

Preserving Our Nation
's Digital Cultural Heritage

project, and would capture and curate a collection of websites for the initial launch
of the service. If that proved successful, it would be made available to other libraries
on a wider scale.


The majority of the work done for W
eb
-
at
-
Risk took place from 2005 to 2009
as the technical preservation infrastructure was developed. This infrastructure
includes web
-
based applications that librarians and curators can use to create
collections of online content and a digital repository wh
ere that content can be
archived and accessed. As the partners planned how they would build the collection,
they faced technical, procedural and cultural challenges. From a technical
standpoint, they would have to develop an application that could compile
large
amounts of data quickly and handle the detailed user interface needed. The web
-
based application was eventually written using Java and Ruby on Rails, a web
application framework. Procedurally they had to decide how to organize the steps to
allow for
the complicated procedure of creating a digital repository, while making
the workflow as simple and user
-
friendly as possible. To help with this they
developed a user manuals and detailed instructions so that libraries could use these
tools or any similar
web archiving infrastructure on their own in the future. There
was also the cultural barrier of reaching out to traditionally document
-
centric
libraries and developing a strategic plan for selecting websites that would be
included in the collection. This p
hase of the project culminated with the Web
Archiving Service (WAS) launch on July 15, 2009.
2





2

Digital Preservation News and Events

The WAS is a digital repository where the public can access the websites
preserved by the partner libraries. The partners acted as curators, organizing
captured
sites by topic or thematic event, and harvesting specific sites for their
relevancy and relation to the rest of the collection. The thematic focus was on
preserving online information generated by state and local government
organizations, citizen groups an
d political parties, though some web content from
federal and international government organizations and non
-
profit organizations
was also included. Partners were (and potential partners still are) encouraged to act
as curators, building on and adding to t
hese themes. The Web Archiving Service is
now available to researchers and libraries beyond the University of California, but
the service and repository, including the storage space and domain, remain hosted
by California Digital Library.

In 2010, Web
-
at
-
Risk partnered with Ithaka Strategy and Research to gather
information on the current state of web archiving and needs of librarians and
archivists. They are looking at what has changed since the project began, how they
can better meet the needs of librari
es and archives, how they can reach out to a
broader research community and what it will cost to sustain the application and the
WAS. As it stands now, the public can access the WAS through the Californai Digital
Library website at
http://webarchives.cdlib
.org/
. The collections are listed there by
theme or event and within each collection the archived sites are listed alphabetically
by name, with links available for captures made on different dates. The site offers
statistics about the archives and partners
, information for researchers and the
option for potential partners to begin using the service.


Sources

1. “
The Web
-
At
-
Risk:

Preserving Our Nation
's Digital Cultural Heritage
.” California



Digital Library, 2010.

http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/partner
s/webatrisk.html
.

2. Murray, Katherine. Web
-
at
-
Risk Assessment Path Final Report. 2007.


3. Digital Preservation News and Events. “
CDL Public Web Archive Service
Collections Launched
.


Library of Congress. July 15, 2009.

http://digitalpreservation.gov/new
s/2009/20090715_article_was.html
.

4. Digital Preservation Partner Tools and Services: Web at Risk. Library of Congress.
http://digitalpreservation.gov/partners/resources/tools/index.html#w
.

5. Web Archiving Service.
http://webarchives.cdlib.org/
.
https://www.techylib.com/en/view/tastefall/brittan_dunham_digital_preservation_howard_besser_october_15
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