Web Archiving Roundup: May 7, 2018

Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup: May 7, 2018

• On Archive-It.org, Diana Bowers-Smith — at the Brooklyn Public Library — writes about ‘Saving Local News on the Web,’ and Archive-It’s Community Webs program.
• This week, at the Yale Center for British Art, John Bell and Jon Ippolito ask whether art can be permanent in the digital age.
• The Society of American Archivists’ Records Management Section reminds us that URLs Aren’t Archives.
• A look at Archiving the 1 October Web over at The Public Historian.
• And, at Wired: What Happens When Science Just Disappears?

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Web Archiving Roundup: April 16, 2018

Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup for April 16, 2018:

• On NiemanLab, read about how the New York Times is trying to preserve millions of old pages the way they were originally published. (Archived link.)
  
• Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed has developed two new videos about the ins and outs of web archiving (in Dutch, of course, but featuring English subtitles). (Archived link.)
• The International Internet Preservation Consortium has an update on the Web Curator Tool. (Archived link.)
• And the California Digital Library has an update on Cobweb, which supports the distributed work of nominating websites for inclusion in web archive collections by allowing project organizers to establish, describe, and manage thematic collecting projects. (Archived link.)
• From the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Adventures in Conserving Old Tech. (Archived link.)

Web Archiving Roundup: April 2, 2018

Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup for April 2, 2018:

• In If These Crawls Could Talk, Emily Maemura, Nicholas Worby, Ian Milligan, and Christoph Becker 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.’
• Why is it Important to Preserve Old Software? Steve Goldstein and Euan Cochrane tackle the question.
• Fourteen years of Archiving the Croatian Web.
• At Ethics and Archiving the Web, Ian Milligan looks at the Ethics of Studying GeoCities.
• Time to update your links: Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service.

Web Archiving Roundup: March 19, 2018

Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup for March 19, 2018:

• Read about the Accidental Web Archive at Virginia Tech: Roger Christman reflects upon what went into creating the Library of Virginia’s ‘Tragedy at Virginia Tech,’ Archive-It collection. (Archived link.)
• Listen to Nicki Saylor and Trevor Owens talk about preserving online web cultures. (Archived link.)
• In partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloane Foundation, Yale has plans to ‘recover more than 3,000 obsolete computer programs so that they can be accessed with modern technology.’ (Archived link.)
• In Ireland, the Web Archiving & Preservation Task Force has reconvened. (Archived link.)
• Don’t forget: iPres is accepting contributions for its September conference. This year’s theme — Where art and science meet: the art in science and the science in art. Papers, posters, demonstrations, workshops, tutorials, and panels are due on April 15. Other contributions — digital preservation games, original graphics, and lightning talks — are due in May.
• And, both the Digital Library Federation Forum and Digital Preservation 2018 are accepting proposals. Proposals for both conferences are due on May 7, 2018.

Web Archiving Roundup: March 5, 2018

Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup for March 5, 2018:

• Read up on the Web Integrity Project — an initiative of the Sunlight Foundation, dedicated to monitoring changes to government websites and ‘holding our government accountable by revealing shifts in public information and access to Web resources, as well as changes in stated policies and priorities.’ (Archived link.)
• When Good Links Go Bad: Link Rot in Ebooks: as Teresa Elsey writes, ‘As the web continually changes and reorganizes itself, the URLs included in ebooks eventually become outdated and stop working.” One solution for ebook developers? “… When their links rot, … point to an archive of the page rather than the page itself.” (Archived link.)
• A new report on the scholarly use of web archives from Maria-Dorina Costea and NetLab. (Archived link.)
• Read about how the Harvard National Security Journal uses the Perma.cc API. (Archived link.)
• You now have until March 12 to submit your papers to Web Archiving Histories and Futures, to be held in Wellinton, New Zealand from November 13-15.

Web Archiving Roundup: February 19, 2018

Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup for February 19, 2018:

• Archives Unleashed at the British Library: working with web archive data from the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s ‘National Olympic and Paralympic Committees‘ collection, a group of researchers asked: ‘What is the gender distribution of National Olympic Committees?’ (Archived link.)
• The Really Old Website Resurrector: faced with defunct copies of departmental websites stored on CDs and DVDs, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Archives tested their ability to temporarily host the websites again using Archive-It and what’s now called the Really Old Website Resurrector. Code for the Resurrector is up on GitHub.
• Link Rot for Lawyers: a blog post in which Perma.cc asks: ‘Is link rot a problem for law firms?‘ Hint: yes. In fact, after reviewing court filings made in the last five years by three of the largest law firms in the United States, Perma.cc found that ‘over 80% had at least one broken link’ and that, ‘on average, these briefs contained around six broken links each, and one brief contained seventeen broken links.’ (Archived link.)
• Erasing history: from the Columbia Journalism Review — ‘When an online news outlet goes out of business, its archives can disappear as well. The new battle over journalism’s digital legacy.’ (Archived link.)
• Watch Improving the Robustness of the Arquivo.pt Web Archive, which ‘provides an overview of the architecture and functioning of the system that supports the Arquivo.pt web archive.’
• Ethics & Archiving the Web‘s full conference schedule is out, and tickets are now available for purchase. Ethics & Archiving the Web will be held March 22-24 at the New Museum in New York. (And for those who cannot attend: conference sessions and some workshop sessions will be livestreamed.)
• You still have time to submit proposals to Web Archiving Histories and Futures, to be held November 13-15 in Wellington, New Zealand. Proposals are due February 28, and may cover: building web archives, maintaining web archive content and operations, using and researching web archives, and / or web archive histories and futures.

Web Archiving Roundup: February 5, 2018

Happy February, Roundtablers! Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup for February 5, 2018:

• Archiving the alternative presses threatened by wealthy buyers: in partnership with Archive-It, Freedom of the Press Foundation is launching an online archives collection, focused ‘on news outlets we deem to be especially vulnerable to the billionaire problem,’ and ‘aims to preserve sites in their entirety before their archives can be taken down or manipulated.’ (Archived link.)
• A New Playback Tool for the UK Web Archive: the UK Web Archive will be working with Rhizome to build a version of pyweb (Python Wayback) that they ‘hope will greatly improve the quality of playback for access to our archived content.’ (Archived link.)
• And, speaking of: Webrecorder has released an updated version of pyweb, ‘a major refactoring and improvement’ of the ‘core engine’ that powers Webrecorder. (Archived link.)
• The International Internet Preservation Consortium Content Development Group would like your help to archive websites from around the world related to the 2018 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games! Submit seeds via this Google Form.

Web Archiving Roundup: January 22, 2018

Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup for January 22, 2018:

• A Case for Digital Squirrels: in First Monday, authors Lindsay Kistler Mattock, Colleen Theisen, and Jennifer Burek Pierce look at ‘the myth of YouTube as an archive’ and discuss their ‘recommendations for developing new practices for archiving YouTube content to support scholarly research.’ (Archived link.)
• An update from Cobweb: from the University of California Los Angeles, Harvard University, and California Digital Library — and, with a production launch in 2018 — Cobweb seeks to empower ‘specialists, digital curators, and researchers’ by allowing them to ‘establish thematic web archiving collecting projects; nominate web resources for capture; claim nominated web resources with an intention to capture them; and contribute descriptions of those web resources that have been captured.’ (Archived link.)
• Rhizome receives $1 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation: the money ‘will support Webrecorder’s implementation in institutional contexts, while upgrading capture and usability for all users.’ (Archived link.)
• We’re all Bona Fide: on On Archivy, Bergis Jules argues that preserving cultural heritage on the web should be an inclusive and community-centered effort. ‘Archiving social media content,’ he writes, ‘should be a shared professional and community responsibility because it not only stretches our resources further, but it can also help to ensure that the records we end up creating are more representative of marginalized people.’ (Archived link.)
• You still have time to let the International Internet Preservation Consortium know what you need when it comes to web archiving training: fill out this survey, and help the Consortium in its quest to develop materials for all types of training, be it technical, curatorial, or training for practitioners and researchers.

Web Archiving Roundup: January 8, 2018

Happy New Year, Roundtablers! Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup for January 8, 2018:

• Meet the Librarians Saving the Internet: at Science Friday, Lauren J. Young profiles a few of the digital librarians who ‘continue to preserve our history’ by navigating ‘through a labyrinth of dispersed personal accounts on the web that have come and gone through time. (Archived link.)
• Read .supDigital’s interview with Dragan Espenchied, Preservation Director for Rhizome (and Webrecorder.io). Then, read more from Jasmine Mulliken and .supDigital on web archiving. (Archived link.)
• On their blog, Old Dominion University urges you to Link to Web Archives, not Search Engine Caches. Why? Because ‘Search Engine caches are useful for covering transient errors in the live web, but they are not archives and thus not suitable for long-term access.’ (Archived link.)
• The Library of Congress will no longer archive every public tweet. Read the Library’s ‘Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress’ here. (Archived link.)
• The International Internet Preservation Consortium wants to know what you need when it comes to web archiving training. Fill out this survey and help the Consortium in its quest develop materials for all types of training: be it technical, curatorial, or training for practitioners and researchers.
• Dust off your résumé and sharpen your Python skills: Rhizome seeks a Senior Backend Developer to work on Webrecorder’s backend infrastructure. Applications are due by January 16, 2018, and can be sent to webrecorderjobs@rhizome.org.

Web Archiving Roundup: December 11, 2017

Happy December, Roundtablers! Here’s your Web Archiving Roundup for December 11, 2017:

• Sustaining the Software that Preserves Access to Web Archives: on Digital Preservation Day, Andrew Jackson took a look at open source tools that enable access to web archives, and asked us to think about what comes next.
• Speaking of moving forward — how do you move a web archive? On their blog, the National Archives details what went into moving 120 terabytes of data, on seventy drives, from Internet Memory Research’s data centre in Paris, to the Archives site in Kew, and, finally, to the Cloud. (Archived link.)
• For the Digital Preservation Coalition, David S. H. Rosenthal writes about how we might be Losing the Battle to Archive the Web.
• And, at the Atlantic, Alexis C. Madrigal writes that Future Historians Probably Won’t Understand Our Internet, and That’s Okay. Today, he notes: ‘there is more data about more people than ever before, however, the cultural institutions dedicated to preserving the memory of what it was to be alive in our time, including our hours on the internet, may actually be capturing less usable information than in previous eras.’ Still, as Nick Seaver says, ‘Is it terrible that not everything that happens right now will be remembered forever? Yeah, that’s crappy, but it’s historically quite the norm.’ (Archived link.)
• Web Archiving Histories and Futures: the International Internet Preservation Consortium has announced its Call for Papers for its annual conference, to be held at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington from November 13-15, 2018. Abstracts should be 300 to 500 words in length, and may touch upon topics related to: building web archives, maintaining web archive content and operations, using and researching web archives, web archive histories and futures, and more. Proposals are due February 28, 2018.