Building Community and Tools for Analyzing Web Archives through Datathons

Starting in March 2016, the Archives Unleashed team and our collaborators have brought together social scientists, humanists, archivists, librarians, computer scientists, and other stakeholders to explore web archives as research objects. Three objectives motivated our team to develop and organize these events: facilitating scholarly access, community building, and skills training. We believe that we have been successful on all three fronts. For each event, over the course of two to three days, participants formed interdisciplinary teams and explored web archives using a variety of methods and tools. This paper details our experiences in designing these "datathons", with an intent to share lessons learned, highlight interdisciplinary approaches to research and education on web archives, and describe future opportunities.This research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the National Science Foundation (Grants #1624067, #1723430), Start Smart Labs, Rutgers University, Compute Canada, University of Waterloo, and York University. Additional support came from University of Toronto Libraries, Library of Congress, Internet Archive, British Library, the International Internet Preservation Consortium, Simon Fraser University Libraries, SFU Key, and Université du Québec en Outaouais

Web Archiving Democracy

Mary Haberle is a Web Archivist at Archive-It, which is the Internet Archive’s subscription web archiving service. She's part of a support team that provides training and direct support services to our partners, including the archivists on this panel who are all using Archive-It at their institutions. Dory Bower has been an Archives Specialist at the U.S. Government Publishing Office since 2010, where she has worked on a number of projects to increase access to electronic U.S. government resources. Dory began working with web archiving in 2011 and has played a key role in all aspects of the Federal Depository Library Program Web Archive. Megan Craynon has worked at the Maryland State Archives since 2011, and has spent the majority of that time as a team member on the web archiving project. She currently serves as the Deputy Director of Special Collections. Ben Goldman is the Kalin Librarian for Technological Innovations at Penn State University Libraries, where he has overseen web archiving efforts since 2012. Roger Christman is the Governors’ Records Archivist at the Library of Virginia. In his spare time, he also manages the Library’s web archiving program. Nicholas Worby is the Government Information and Statistics Librarian as well as the Web Archives Program Coordinator at the University of Toronto. Ian Milligan is an associate professor of digital and Canadian history at the University of Waterloo. He’s leading a Mellon-funded project to develop a cloud-based infrastructure for the analysis of web archives.As repositories of primary source materials, archives play a central role in supporting the democratic principles of transparency and accountability. Political discourse and many official records of government have shifted from analog to web-based delivery. Web archiving programs that collect content created by elected officials and governments are vital to a robust civil society, which is central to a healthy democracy. This panel brings together information professionals and a digital historian engaged with related content. Professionals actively acquiring websites of elected officials and online government publications will discuss why and how their institutions are building web archives in these areas and what gaps, if any, exist. Panelists will offer their perspectives on the current state of researcher access and how archives can better support researcher engagement with web archives. Questions of professional and institutional responsibility as citizens and as employees of democratic institutions will be explored

If These Crawls Could Talk: Studying and Documenting Web Archives Provenance

This is an accepted manuscript of an article to be published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and TechnologyThe increasing use and prominence of web archives raises the urgency of establishing mechanisms for transparency in the making of web archives to facilitate the process of evaluating a web archive’s provenance, scoping, and absences. Some choices and process events are captured automatically, but their interactions are not currently well understood or documented. This study examines the decision space of web archives and its role in shaping what is and what is not captured in the web archiving process. By comparing how three different web archives collections were created and documented, we investigate how curatorial decisions interact with technical and external factors and we compare commonalities and differences. The findings reveal the need to understand both the social and technical context that shapes those decisions and the ways in which these individual decisions interact. Based on the study, we propose a framework for documenting key dimensions of a collection that addresses the situated nature of the organizational context, technical specificities, and unique characteristics of web materials that are the focus of a collection. The framework enables future researchers to undertake empirical work studying the process of creating web archives collections in different contexts.Part of this work was supported by the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) through RGPIN-2016-06640, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) through Insight Grant 435-2015-0011 and Canada Graduate Scholarship 767-2015-2217. Ian Milligan was also supported by the Marshall McLuhan Centenary Fellowship in Digital Sustainability at the University of Toronto iSchool Digital Curation Institute

Comparing the cost-effectiveness of MRSA control strategies between ICU and non-ICU settings

Introduction / objectives Many strategies are used to control MRSA in hospitals. Only a few have been assessed in clinical trials and it is not obvious how findings should be generalised between settings. Uncertainty remains about which strategies represent the most appropriate use of scarce resources. We assess the cost-effectiveness of alternative MRSA screening and infection control strategies in England and Wales and discuss international relevance. Methods Models of MRSA transmission in ICUs and general medical (GM) wards were developed and used to evaluate different screening methods combined with decolonisation or isolation. Strategies were compared in terms of costs and health benefits (quality adjusted life years, QALYs). Different prevalences, proportions of high risk patients and ward sizes were investigated, and probabilistic sensitivity analyses (PSA) conducted. Results Decolonisation strategies were cost-saving in ICUs at a 5% admission prevalence, with admission and weekly PCR screening the most cost-effective (£3,929/QALY). In ICUs, screening and isolation reduced infection rates by ~10%. With admission prevalence ≤5%, targeting screening and isolation to high risk patients was optimal. In GM wards decolonisation and isolation strategies, though able to reduce MRSA infection rates up to ~50%, were not cost-effective. Conclusion The largest reductions in MRSA infection were achieved by screening and decolonisation strategies, and were cost-effective in ICU settings. In comparison, there is limited potential for screening and control strategies to be cost-effective in GM wards due to lower infection and mortality rates

Canadian Government Information Digital Preservation Network (CGI-DPN)

The mission of the CGI DPN is to preserve digital collections of government information. Digital preservation, for purposes of this initiative, means ensuring the long-term viability of digital materials through geographically dispersed servers, protective measures against data loss, and forward format migration. Digital materials produced by government agencies that are at risk of being lost are preserved as part of the program. The Canadian Government Information Digital Preservation Network (CGI DPN) is a project initiated in October 2012 by library staff at eleven member institutions: University of Alberta, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Calgary, University of Saskatchewan, University of Victoria, McGill University, Dalhousie University, Scholars Portal, University of Toronto, Stanford University. These institutions are the charter members of the CGI DPN Steering Committee. CGI DPN Archive-IT Collections: https://www.archive-it.org/organizations/700 Contact: Katie Cuyler, Chair, [email protected] Carla Graebner, Co-Chair, [email protected]

Collections Policy

The mission of the CGI DPN is to preserve digital collections of government information. Digital preservation, for purposes of this policy, means ensuring the long-term viability of digital materials through geographically dispersed servers, protective measures against data loss, and forward format migration. Digital materials produced by government agencies that are at risk of being lost are preserved as part of the program. This network will also be used to act as a backup server in cases where the main server is unavailable. It will also act as a means of restoring lost data. (CGI-DPN Governance Policy, 1.

Erratum: Mutations in SNX14 Cause a Distinctive Autosomal-Recessive Cerebellar Ataxia and Intellectual Disability Syndrome (American Journal of Human Genetics (2014) 95 (611–621))

Intellectual disability and cerebellar atrophy occur together in a large number of genetic conditions and are frequently associated with microcephaly and/or epilepsy. Here we report the identification of causal mutations in Sorting Nexin 14 (SNX14) found in seven affected individuals from three unrelated consanguineous families who presented with recessively inherited moderate-severe intellectual disability, cerebellar ataxia, early onset cerebellar atrophy, sensorineural hearing loss and the distinctive association of progressively coarsening facial features, relative macrocephaly and the absence of seizures. We used homozygosity mapping and whole exome sequencing to identify a homozygous nonsense mutation and an in-frame multi-exon deletion in two families. A homozygous splice site mutation was identified by Sanger sequencing of SNX14 in a third family, selected purely by phenotypic similarity. This discovery confirms that these characteristic features represent a distinct and recognizable syndrome. SNX14 encodes a cellular protein containing Phox (PX) and regulator of G protein signaling (RGS) domains. Weighted gene co-expression network analysis predicts that SNX14 is highly co-expressed with genes involved in cellular protein metabolism and vesicle mediated transport. All three mutations either directly affected the PX domain or diminished SNX14 levels, implicating a loss of normal cellular function. This manifested as increased cytoplasmic vacuolation as observed in cultured fibroblasts. Our findings indicate an essential role for SNX14 in neural development and function, particularly in development and maturation of the cerebellum