The following is a guest post by Abbie Grotke, Library of Congress Web Archiving Team Lead and NDSA Content Working Group Co-Chair.
Are you or your employer involved in archiving web content? If so, you may be interested in the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s (NDSA) 2nd biannual survey of U.S. organizations that are actively involved or planning to archive web content. In Fall 2011, the NDSA Content Working Group conducted its first survey of U.S. organizations who were doing or about to start web archiving. We blogged about the results of the survey here on the Signal, and published a report in 2012.
On the two-year anniversary of the original, the NDSA is releasing an updated survey to continue to track the evolution of web archiving programs in the U.S. Our goal in conducting these surveys are to better understand the U.S. web archiving landscape: similarities and differences in programmatic approaches, types of content being archived, tools and services being used, access modes being provided, and emerging best practices and challenges. As more institutions tackle web archiving, this type of information gathering and reporting not only raises awareness in the types of activities underway, but helps those preserving web content make the case for archiving back at their home institutions.
For those of you who took the previous survey, you’ll notice some key differences for the 2013 survey: more streamlined answers based on the free-text responses from the last survey, and an increased focus on policy.
As before, the aggregate responses will be reported to NDSA members and summary results will be shared publicly via this blog and elsewhere.
Any U.S. organization currently engaged in web archiving or in the process of planning a web archive is invited to take the survey – click on this link to get started. If you’d like to preview the survey before answering, we have a PDF of the questions available.
The survey will close on November 30, 2013.
I’d like to take a moment to thank some of my NDSA colleagues who stepped up during the government shutdown to help finalize and prepare the survey while the Library of Congress was closed — particularly Nicholas Taylor at Stanford University Libraries, Jefferson Bailey at METRO, Cathy Hartman from University of North Texas Libraries (and my co-chair on the Content Working Group), Kristine Hanna at the Internet Archive, and Edward McCain at the Reynolds Journalism Institute/University of Missouri Libraries. Thanks to these folks, we are able to get this survey launched today!