As higher education embraces new technologies, university activities-including teaching, learning, and research-increasingly take place on university websites, on universityrelated social media pages, and elsewhere on the open Web. Despite perceptions that "once it's on the Web, it's there forever," this dynamic digital content is highly vulnerable to degradation and loss. In order to preserve and provide enduring access to this complex body of university records, archivists and librarians must rise to the challenge of Web archiving. As digital archivists at our respective institutions, the authors introduce the concept of Web archiving and articulate its importance in higher education. We provide our institutions' rationale for selecting subscription service Archive-It as a preservation tool, outline the progress of our institutional Web archiving initiatives, and share lessons learned, from unexpected stumbling blocks to strategies for raising funds and support from campus stakeholders.
IntroductionIn Pennsylvania and elsewhere, higher education is experiencing many significant shifts as it adjusts to the new capabilities and culture of digital technology. While MOOCs and mediated classrooms dominate the news, the disruption of universities' long-established information sharing and communication practices has been mostly unacknowledged. Static analog recordkeeping is being uprooted as dynamic digital media replace the printed publications long preserved by university archivists. Some of these digital files bear a resemblance to their print ancestors, but others present much more complexity. University course catalogs, for example, may now take the form of a relational database, refreshed each year with updated digital content. Internal records, such as assessment reports and faculty senate meeting minutes, previously typed and stored in departmental filing cabinets, are now emailed to recipients in digital formats (often PDF). Press releases, once simply typed on university letterhead, are now dynamic Web pages, often featuring embedded media files like images and videos. Student clubs and activities, once carefully preserved in the campus newspaper and annual yearbook, have moved onto social media pages and Web apps. Alumni plan their reunions on Facebook, while current students trade photographs on Instagram andSnapChat.Accompanying these changes in format is a similar disruption in scale. As digital information becomes easier to create and share, university departments and divisions produce an even more prolific body of records. The sheer number of born-digital documents and the frequency and regularity with which they are updated or replaced by new information simply overwhelms traditional archival practice. How can university archivists and records managers ever hope to gather, select, preserve, and manage their institutional records? The complexity of this question has proved staggeringly difficult for many institutions, forestalling necessary action.Still, these digital preservation challenges urgently...
