Capture All the URLs: First Steps in Web Archiving

Abstract

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...

Web archiving of indigenous knowledge systems in South Africa

“…Studies have reported the involvement of academic institutions in web archiving initiatives such as the Queens University Canada (Heil and Jin, 2017), Wake Forest University (Fansler et al, 2014), University of Toronto (Milligan, 2016), State and University Library Denmark (Sutton, 2004), Drexel University, Slippery Rock University, and the University of Scranton (Antracoli et al, 2014). This is contrary to the findings of Khumalo and Nkala (2015), which revealed that, apart from the lack of awareness of the respondents about web archiving, African institutions are not involved in web archiving initiatives to harvest their institutional repositories for future use.…”

“…The collaborative effort between Drexel University, Slippery Rock University, and the University of Scranton is also a good example of how academic institutions have been able to embark on successful Web archiving initiatives through collaboration (Antracoli et al, 2014). The New York Art Consortium (NYARC) is also able to collaborate to collect, preserve and provide access to “art ephemera born in digital formats native to the web” Duncan and Blumenthal (2016: 116).…”

“…There is a relatively short timeframe within which the contents on a website can be retained and this has been a driving force for web archiving initiatives, particularly in the cultural heritage community (Pennock, 2013). Studies have reported the involvement of academic institutions in Web archiving initiatives such as Queens University Canada (Heil and Jin, 2017), Wake Forrest University (Fansler et al, 2014), University of Toronto (Milligan, 2016), State and University Library Denmark (Sutton, 2004), Drexel University, Slippery Rock University and the University of Scranton (Antracoli et al, 2014). This study is, however, in contrast to these findings because none of the institutions are actively involved in Web archiving initiatives.…”

Preserving born-digital catalogues raisonnés: Web archiving at the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC)

“…NYARC will partner with DuraCloud during the second year of the grant to Ideally, die implementation of a quality assurance programme ensures that the Web content crawled by die institution has been accurately and completely archived so that die capture includes not only H T M L content but also the look and feel of the site, as well as embedded documents and audiovisual materials. 6 With permission from staff of The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonne, NYARC has included die P D F version in our Archive-It collection, where it serves as documentation of the catalogue as it existed in summer 2014. We will continue to archive this catalogue raisonne over time, with frequency of capture mirroring the schedule of update to information made publicly viewable widiin die catalogue.…”