Interrogating the politics and performativity of web archives

Since the mid-1990s institutions such as national libraries and the Internet Archive have been ‘archiving the Web’ through the harvesting, collection and preservation of ‘web objects’ (e.g. websites, web pages, social media) in web archives [55]. Much of the focus of the web archiving community has been on the continued development of technologies and practices for web collection development [38], with an increased attention in recent years on facilitating the scholarly use of web archives [25, 24, 61]. This research will take a step back to consider the place of web archives in light of ‘the archival turn’ and emergent questions over the ever- expansive role of the archive and the Web in everyday life. First coined by Stoler [81], ‘the archival turn’ denotes a shift from ‘archive as source’ to ‘archive as subject,’ signalling wide-ranging epistemological questions concerning the role of the archive (and the archivist) in shaping and legitimising knowledge and particular ways of knowing. This research proposes to re-situate web archives as places of knowledge and cultural production in their own right, by implicating both the web archivist and the technologies in the shaping of the ‘politics of ephemerality’ [82] that lead to the creation and maintenance of web archives. This study will identify key underlying assumptions about what the Web is (e.g. a ‘Web of Documents,’ ‘abstract information space’), what of the contemporary Web is (or isn’t) being archived, and the relative affordances for web archival practice and scholarly use. Furthermore, drawing on critical approaches to information, Science and Technology Studies and Web Science, this research will engage with the performativity of web archiving, the practices of selection, collection and classification, and the possible implications for a socio-technical understanding of web archives

Ethical perspective on political-economic issues in the long-term preservation of digital heritage

The article provides an overview of the main ethical and associated political-economic aspects of the preservation of born-digital content and the digitization of analogue content for purposes of preservation. The term “heritage” is used broadly to include scientific and scholarly publications and data. Although the preservation of heritage is generally seen as inherently “good,” this activity implies the exercise of difficult moral choices. The ethical complexity of the preservation of digital heritage is illustrated by means of two hypothetical cases. The first deals with the harvesting and preservation in a wealthy country of political websites originating in a less affluent country. The second deals with a project initiated by a wealthy country to digitize the cultural heritage of a less affluent country. The ethical reflection that follows is structured within the framework of social justice and a set of information rights that are identified as corollaries of generally recognized human rights. The main moral agents, that is, the parties that have an interest, and may be entitled to exercise rights, in relation to digital preservation, are identified. The responsibilities that those who preserve digital content have toward these parties, and the political-economic considerations that arise, are then analyzed.This article is an expanded version of a keynote paper presented at the UNESCO Information for All Programme (UNESCO/IFAP) International Conference on the Preservation of Digital Information in the Information Society, Moscow, October 3–5, 2011.http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1532-289