Mass digitization — coupled with new media, technology and distribution networks — has transformed what’s possible for libraries and their users. The Library of Congress makes millions of items freely available on loc.gov and other public sites like HathiTrust and DPLA. Incredible resources — like digitized historic newspapers from across the United States, the personal papers …
The following is a guest post by Andrea Goethals, Digital Preservation and Repository Manager at Harvard Library. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, so I wanted to have a catchy Irish saying for the title but, believe it or not, Irish sayings about web archiving or even the web are hard to find. I did find some …
Do you have fifteen minutes to tell the National Digital Stewardship Alliance about your organization’s web archiving activities? If the answer is yes, please contribute to the NDSA Web Archiving Survey. By filling out this short survey, your institution will be part of a multi-year project to track the evolution of web archiving programs in …
Newspapers are some of the most-used collections at libraries. They have been carefully selected and preserved and represent what is often referred to as “the first draft of history.” Digitized historical newspapers provide broad and rich access to a community’s past, enabling new kinds of inquiry and research. However, these kinds of resources are at …
Imagine you’re a legal scholar and you’re examining the U.S. Supreme Court decisions of the late nineties to mid-two thousands and you want to understand what resources were consulted to support official opinions. A study in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology indicates you would find that only half of the nearly 555 URL …
For someone who thinks about web archiving almost every day it’s sometimes hard to explain to people outside the digital library community why archiving web sites is worth doing. “They archive themselves,” some say. “Why would you want to save what’s on the Internet?” they wonder. Instead of launching into explanations about cultural heritage, dynamic …
Recently, the world of web archiving has been a busy one. Here are some quick updates: The National Library of Estonia released the Estonian Web Archive to the public. This is of particular note because the Legal Deposit Law in Estonia allows the archive to be publicly accessible online. If you read Estonian you can browse …
Web archives are unique in digital library collections. They contain numerous formats, versions and content types. Acquiring, preserving and providing access to web archives often required specialized software, processes and skills. These factors can make it difficult for organizations to embark on web archiving and integrate web archiving into existing library departments and services. The …
Late in April, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the International Internet Preservation Consortium gathered for its annual General Assembly. This year is the 10th anniversary of the organization, and we marked the milestone by reflecting on our past accomplishments and thinking about how the members could work together to make positive and lasting impacts on the field of …
