As announced earlier this month, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance is sponsoring a survey of organizations in the United States who are actively involved in or planning to archive content from the web.
The goal of the survey is to better understand the landscape of web archiving activities in the United States, including what organizations or individuals are archiving, what types of web content are being preserved, the tools and services being used, and what type of access is being provided for researchers.
We’re pretty excited about the early results of the survey: 67 organizations or individuals have responded so far. We haven’t yet done any formal analysis on the results, but a quick peek at the list of types of organizations that have responded so far show that — not surprisingly — many universities and colleges are at the top of the list, with “other” in second place (details about those to come later, after our analysis is done).
Our survey hasn’t apparently reached anyone in the museum community who might be archiving, or those in the commercial sector. Please help spread the word if you are in these communities.
Members of the NDSA Content working group are looking forward to further analyzing the data collected to learn more about the network of web archiving activities in the United States.
There is still time to take the survey and we encourage any organization that is engaged in web archiving, or planning to get involved soon, to participate. If you want to review the entire set of questions first, we’ve posted them at http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/docs/USWebArchivingSurvey.pdf.
We would really like to hear from you, please respond to the survey.