cRIsp: Crowdsourcing Representation Information to Support Preservation

In this paper, we describe a new collaborative approach to the collection of representation information to ensure long term access to digital content. Representation information is essential for successful rendering of digital content in the future. Manual collection and maintenance of representation information has so far proven to be highly resource intensive and is compounded by the massive scale of the challenge, especially for repositories with no format limitations. This solution combats these challenges by drawing upon the wisdom and knowledge of the crowd to identify online sources of representation information, which are then collected, classified, and managed using existing tools. We suggest that nominations can be harvested and preserved by participating established web archives, which themselves could obviously benefit from such extensive collections. This is a low cost, low resource approach to collecting essential representation information of widespread relevance

Web Archiving Environmental Scan

Environmental scan of Web archiving activities at university libraries around the United States

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

The Archives Unleashed Project: Technology, Process, and Community to Improve Scholarly Access to Web Archives

The Archives Unleashed project aims to improve scholarly access to web archives through a multi-pronged strategy involving tool creation, process modeling, and community building -- all proceeding concurrently in mutually --reinforcing efforts. As we near the end of our initially-conceived three-year project, we report on our progress and share lessons learned along the way. The main contribution articulated in this paper is a process model that decomposes scholarly inquiries into four main activities: filter, extract, aggregate, and visualize. Based on the insight that these activities can be disaggregated across time, space, and tools, it is possible to generate "derivative products", using our Archives Unleashed Toolkit, that serve as useful starting points for scholarly inquiry. Scholars can download these products from the Archives Unleashed Cloud and manipulate them just like any other dataset, thus providing access to web archives without requiring any specialized knowledge. Over the past few years, our platform has processed over a thousand different collections from over two hundred users, totaling around 300 terabytes of web archives.This research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as Start Smart Labs, Compute Canada, the University of Waterloo, and York University. We’d like to thank Jeremy Wiebe, Ryan Deschamps, and Gursimran Singh for their contributions

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase

JISC Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) Handbook

Handbook of Web Preservation produced by the JISC-PoWR project which ran from April to November 2008. The handbook specifically addresses digital preservation issues that are relevant to the UK HE/FE web management community”. The project was undertaken jointly by UKOLN at the University of Bath and ULCC Digital Archives department

Recognizing Co-Creators in Four Configurations: Critical Questions for Web Archiving

Four categories of co-creator shape web archivists\u27 practice and influence the development of web archives: social forces, users and uses, subjects of web archives, and technical agents. This paper illustrates how these categories of co-creator overlap and interact in four specific web archiving contexts. It recommends that web archivists acknowledge this complex array of contributors as a way to imagine web archives differently. A critical approach to web archiving recognizes relationships and blended roles among stakeholders; seeks opportunities for non-extractive archival activity; and acknowledges the value of creative reuse as an important aspect of preservation

DCC Digital Curation Manual: Instalment on Archiving Web Resources

Material on the Internet is transitory, fragile and ephemeral. Web archiving represents a systematic attempt to bring stability to the information found in websites

BlogForever: D3.1 Preservation Strategy Report

This report describes preservation planning approaches and strategies recommended by the BlogForever project as a core component of a weblog repository design. More specifically, we start by discussing why we would want to preserve weblogs in the first place and what it is exactly that we are trying to preserve. We further present a review of past and present work and highlight why current practices in web archiving do not address the needs of weblog preservation adequately. We make three distinctive contributions in this volume: a) we propose transferable practical workflows for applying a combination of established metadata and repository standards in developing a weblog repository, b) we provide an automated approach to identifying significant properties of weblog content that uses the notion of communities and how this affects previous strategies, c) we propose a sustainability plan that draws upon community knowledge through innovative repository design