The vast expanse and volatility of art ephemera based on the World Wide Web pose significant threats to the completeness of the art historical record. Towards its mission to enhance the resources available for current and future research through collaboration, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) collects, preserves, and provides access to art ephemera born in digital formats native to the web. It leverages its member institutions’ collecting strengths and resources to establish a permanently sustainable web archiving programme. This article introduces NYARC's web archiving practices at the principal stages in a typical web archive's lifecycle, describes how each benefit from collaboration among its member libraries and external programme partners, and identifies opportunities for further art libraries and consortia to participate in this important effort to preserve at-risk art historical resources.

In 2017, seven members of the Archive-It Mid-Atlantic Users Group (AITMA) conducted a study of fourteen participants representative of their stakeholder populations to assess the usability of Archive-It, a web archiving subscription service of the Internet Archive. While Archive-It is the most widely used tool for web archiving, little is known about how users interact with the service. This study investigated what users expect from web archives, a distinct form of archival materials. End-user participants executed four search tasks using the public Archive-It interface and the Wayback Machine to access archived information on websites from the facilitators' own harvested collections and provided feedback about their experiences. The tasks were designed to have straightforward outcomes (completed or not completed), and the facilitators took notes on the participants' behavior and commentary during the sessions. Overall, participants reported mildly positive impressions of the Archive-It public user interface based on their sessions. The study identified several key areas of improvement for the Archive-It service pertaining to metadata options, terminology display, indexing of dates, and the site's search box.

There has been a dramatic shift in publication of scholarly art research materials from print to digital formats. In late 2013, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) was awarded a two-year grant by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to address challenges of preservation and continued access for future researchers of these materials by implementing a web archiving programme. Due to the transition of many catalogues raisonnés to online from print, born-digital catalogues raisonnés are one of the five key collecting areas of focus for NYARC’s project. The intention of this article is to provide an introduction to the key components of the implementation of NYARC’s web archiving programme, to explore the far-flung implications of the digital shift, and to demonstrate the need for a community of collaboration in building curated web archive collections to benefit the future art historian.

The vast expanse and volatility of art ephemera based on the World Wide Web pose significant threats to the completeness of the art historical record as sustained by art libraries. Towards its mission to enhance the resources available for current and future research through collaboration among leading museum libraries, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) collects, preserves, and provides access to art ephemera born in digital formats native to the web. It leverages its member institutions’ traditional collecting strengths and combined resources to establish an initial and model a permanently sustainable web archiving programme. This article introduces NYARC’s web archiving practices as they manifest at the principal stages in a typical web archive’s lifecycle, describes how each directly benefits from collaboration among its member libraries and external programme partners, and identifies opportunities for further art libraries and their consortia to participate in this important effort to serve and preserve at-risk art historical resources.

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