The launch of a new web site is the perfect opportunity for an organization to revamp itself. Information is refreshed and updated, new initiatives are touted while old content and projects get shuffled out of plain sight. Graphics and architectures change to better meet user needs and underlying technologies allow for easier management.
Even an organization whose entire mission is to save historic information from the web must still keep up with the modern way of communicating. Last week, the International Internet Preservation Consortium released a new public web site complete with a new logo, videos, case studies, and visualizations.
The new content is more interactive than the basic structure of our old site and the new site does look and feel fresher. But the project has more to do with the advancement of the entire field of web archiving than a simple face lift.
When the IIPC started in 2003 with eleven national libraries and the Internet Archive the tools were limited and the community was very small. Today, the IIPC has over 40 member libraries, archives, universities, non-profits, and commercial service providers from around the world. New tools for selecting, harvesting, and preserving web sites have been deployed at member institutions and IIPC events have grown from two day working group meetings to an annual week-long conference on web archiving.
While the IIPC, web archiving, and the web in general become a larger and more complex ecosystem, the goal for netpreserve.org is to be a resource for those who create, preserve, and use web archives. Another goal of the project is to create a model of how today’s media-rich web sites can be archived. In the coming weeks look for a case study write up about the tools and processes available to archive the new and improved netpreserve.org.