James R. Jacobs, Pamela M. Graham & Kris Kasianovitz: What’s in your web archive? Subject specialist strategies for collection development

We’ve been archiving the web for many years but the need for web archiving really hit home for me in 2013 when NASA took down every one of their technical reports – for review on various grounds. And the web archiving community was very concerned. Michael Nelson said in a post “NASA information is too important to be left on nasa.gov computers”. And I wrote about when we rely on pointing not archiving.

So, as we planned for this panel we looked back on previous IIPC events and we didn’t see a lot about collection curation. We posed three topics all around these areas. So for each theme we’ll watch a brief screen cast by Kris to introduce them…

1. Collection development and roles

Kris (via video): I wanted to talk about my role as a subject specialist and how collection development fits into that. AS a subject specialist that is a core part of the role, and I use various tools to develop the collection. I see web archiving as absolutely being part of this. Our collection is books, journals, audio visual content, quantitative and qualitative data sets… Web archives are just another piece of the pie. And when we develop our collection we are looking at what is needed now but in anticipation of what we be needed 10 or 20 years in the future, building a solid historical record that will persist in collections. And we think about how our archives fit into the bigger context of other archives around the country and around the world.

For the two web archives I work on – CA.gov and the Bay Area Governments archives – I am the primary person engaged in planning, collecting, describing and making available that content. And when you look at the web capture life cycle you need to ensure the subject specialist is included and their role understood and valued.

The CA.gov archive involves a group from several organisations including the government library. We have been archiving since 2007 in the California Digital Library initially. We moved into Archive-It in 2013.

The Bay Area Governments archives includes materials on 9 counties, but primarily and comprehensively focused on two key counties here. We bring in regional governments and special districts where policy making for these areas occur.

Archiving these collections has been incredibly useful for understanding government, their processes, how to work with government agencies and the dissemination of this work. But as the sole responsible person that is not ideal. We have had really good technical support from Internet Archive around scoping rules, problems with crawls, thinking about writing regular expressions, how to understand and manage what we see from crawls. We’ve also benefitted from working with our colleague Nicholas Taylor here at Stanford who wrote a great QA report which has helped us.

We are heavily reliant on crawlers, on tools and technologies created by you and others, to gather information for our archive. And since most subject selectors have pretty big portfolios of work – outreach, instruction, as well as collection development – we have to have good ties to developers, and to the wider community with whom we can share ideas and questions is really vital.

Pamela: I’m going to talk about two Columbia archives, the Human Rights Web Archive (HRWA) and Historic Preservation and Urban Planning. I’d like to echo Kris’ comments about the importance of subject specialists. The Historic Preservation and Urban Planning archive is led by our architecture subject specialist and we’d reached a point where we had to collect web materials to continue that archive – and she’s done a great job of bringing that together. Human Rights seems to have long been networked – using the idea of the “internet” long before the web and hypertext. We work closely with Alex Thurman, and have an additional specially supported web curator, but there are many more ways to collaborate and work together.

James: I will also reflect on my experience. And the FDLP – Federal Library Program – involves libraries receiving absolutely every government publications in order to ensure a comprehensive archive. There is a wider programme allowing selective collection. At Stanford we are 85% selective – we only weed out content (after five years) very lightly and usually flyers etc. As a librarian I curate content. As an FDLP library we have to think of our collection as part of the wider set of archives, and I like that.

As archivists we also have to understand provenance… How do we do that with the web archive. And at this point I have to shout out to Jefferson Bailey and colleagues for the “End of Term” collection – archiving all gov sites at the end of government terms. This year has been the most expansive, and the most collaborative – including FTP and social media. And, due to the Trump administration’s hostility to science and technology we’ve had huge support – proposals of seed sites, data capture events etc.

2. Collection Development approaches to web archives, perspectives from subject specialists

As subject specialists we all have to engage in collection development – there are no vendors in this space…

Kris: Looking again at the two government archives I work on there is are Depository Program Statuses to act as a starting point… But these haven’t been updated for the web. However, this is really a continuation of the print collection programme. And web archiving actually lets us collect more – we are no longer reliant on agencies putting content into the Depository Program.

So, for CA.gov we really treat this as a domain collection. And no-one really doing this except some UCs, myself, and state library and archives – not the other depository libraries. However, we don’t collect think tanks, or the not-for-profit players that influence policy – this is for clarity although this content provides important context.

We also had to think about granularity… For instance for the CA transport there is a top level domain and sub domains for each regional transport group, and so we treat all of these as seeds.

Scoping rules matter a great deal, partly as our resources are not unlimited. We have been fortunate that with the CA.gov archive that we have about 3TB space for this year, and have been able to utilise it all… We may not need all of that going forwards, but it has been useful to have that much space.

Pamela: Much of what Kris has said reflects our experience at Columbia. Our web archiving strengths mirror many of our other collection strengths and indeed I think web archiving is this important bridge from print to fully digital. I spent some time talking with our librarian (Chris) recently, and she will add sites as they come up in discussion, she monitors the news for sites that could be seeds for our collection… She is very integrated in her approach to this work.

For the human rights work one of the challenges is the time that we have to contribute. And this is a truly interdisciplinary area with unclear boundaries, and those are both challenging aspects. We do look at subject guides and other practice to improve and develop our collections. And each fall we sponsor about two dozen human rights scholars to visit and engage, and that feeds into what we collect… The other thing that I hope to do in the future is to do more assessment to look at more authoritative lists in order to compare with other places… Colleagues look at a site called ideallist which lists opportunities and funding in these types of spaces. We also try to capture sites that look more vulnerable – small activist groups – although it is nt clear if they actually are that risky.

Cost wise the expensive part of collecting is both human effort to catalogue, and the permission process in the collecting process. And yesterday’s discussion of possible need for ethics groups as part of the permissions prpcess.