Weekly web archiving roundup: November 29, 2015

Here is the weekly web archiving roundup for November 29, 2015:

  • Massive, 4,000-page Infocom design and biz archive posted online: This is big news, in the realm of game design studies.
  • 2016 IIPC General Assembly & Web Archiving Conference: The IIPC is seeking proposals for presentations and workshops for the 2016 IIPC Web Archiving Conference and for the IIPC General Assembly.
  • Five Takeaways from AOIR 2015: Eyewitness report from the annual Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR) conference.
  • Institutional vs. Twitter Seed Lists for Web Archives: What would a web archive created using the tweets of users look like compared to a formal collection, curated by a subject librarian? And how much of it would be in the Wayback Machine?
  • Using Warcbase with a Spark Notebook: What it is, and how to set it up.

Weekly web archiving roundup: November 22, 2015

Weekly web archiving roundup for November 22, 2015:

  • How much of the Internet does the Wayback Machine really archive? Surprisingly little is known about what exactly is in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
  • You get what you get and you don’t get upset: David Rosenthal’s take on the IIPC mail alias discussion of the Forbes article about the Wayback Machine.
  • The Provenance of Web Archives: The UK Web Archive considers how we should document our crawls.
  • The Irony of Writing Online About Digital Preservation: Last month, The Atlantic published a lengthy article about information that is lost on the web. That story itself is in jeopardy.
  • Workshop on Missing Warc Features: Considering a session on crawl artifacts that don’t yet fit in WARCs for #iipcGA16, and looking for co-presenters.

Weekly web archiving roundup: November 14, 2015

Weekly web archiving roundup for November 14, 2015:

  • Plan Your Digital Legacy, and Update Often: “As more wealth moves into the cloud, good luck tracking this stuff.”
  • How the Internet Archive maintains an information super highway: An interview with the director of media and access at Internet Archive, Alexis Rossi, and Vicky Brasseur, a volunteer maintaining the Internet Archive S3 API documentation.
  • New DAS Web Archiving Webinar Begins Streaming November 16: This course introduces the core concepts of web archiving and provides a firm foundation for further expansion of skill sets.
  • WAS to Archive-It Migration Update: The Web Archiving Service (WAS) migration to Internet Archive’s Archive-It Service reached two major milestones last week.
  • Thoughts from Partner staff about web archiving: An overview of a recent OCLC Research Library Partnership survey investigating the needs of the web archiving community.
  • Post Firewall–“Mining the Internet Graveyard: Rethinking the Historians’ Toolkit”: Newly open access article argues that the advent of a massive quantity of born-digital historical sources necessitates a rethinking of the historians’ toolkit.

2015 Special Election: Web Archiving Roundtable Secretary

As approved by the August by-law referendum, the Web Archiving Roundtable will be electing a Secretary to serve the remainder of the 2015-2016 term. Please see candidate statements below:

Samantha Abrams
Right now, I split my time several ways. I’m a second-year iSchool student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I work two jobs: one for the Oral History Department here on campus, processing born-digital audio files, and one at Culver’s, as the organization’s first archivist. At Culver’s, I’ve been knee-deep in all kinds of audiovisual materials: 35mm film, U-Matic tapes, DAT tapes, VHS tapes, and on. Before joining Culver’s, I was a Project Assistant at the Wisconsin Historical Society, where I served, for two years, as the assistant to the Wisconsin State Historical Records Advisory Board. On behalf of the Board I: planned and handled logistics for quarterly meetings, wrote meeting agendas, took detailed meeting minutes, and wrote many state-wide communications on behalf of the state archivist. This past summer, I was a Web archiving intern at the Library of Congress, where I was fortunate enough to explore many aspects of the practice: the legality of Web archiving and how the Library curated their collections, in particular. It’s an experience I still carry with me: I enjoy the discussions that surround archiving the Web, and I hope to begin a program at Culver’s in the near future. I’d love to be part of the Roundtable in this volunteer capacity: I think it’s important to give back to the profession that has already given so much to me, and I have ample experience when it comes to handling the logistics of an organization and its meetings.

Alexis A. Antracoli
I am currently the Assistant University Archivist for Technical Services at Princeton University’s Mudd Manuscript Library, where I lead technical services operations, including the implementation of our web archiving program. Previously I worked as Records Management Archivist at Drexel University and Project Archivist at the Bentley Historical Library. I graduated from the University of Michigan’s School of Information in 2011 with a specialization in Archives and Records Management.

I am interested in serving as Secretary of the Web Archiving Roundtable as a way to use my organizational and leadership skills to contribute to the growth of this area of the archival profession. In addition to the duties of Secretary, I am particularly interested in contributing to the development of resources for practitioners of web archiving, supporting ongoing educational programming, and creating spaces for practitioners to exchange ideas and solve problems together. I have been involved with web archiving since the beginning of my professional career, and have worked at institutions with varied approaches to web archiving and differing resources for implementing and managing a program. I have also presented and published on web archiving, and am active in the Mid-Atlantic Archive-It User Group. These experiences have provided me with a strong background on the variety of ways that web archiving is implemented and managed across our profession, as well as with the range of opportunities and challenges that archivist face in capturing and preserving the Web. I would welcome the opportunity to continue to contribute to the web archiving community as Secretary of the Web Archiving Roundtable.

Rachel Trent
I currently serve as Digital Services Manager at George Washington University, and have previously been Digital Collections Manager at the State Library of North Carolina and Digital Archivist at the State Archives of North Carolina. I have been collaboratively managing web archiving programs since 2012, including the North Carolina Government Web Archiving and Social Media Archiving Program. I currently
lead the web archiving program at George Washington University, and I have presented on web archiving, social media archiving, and the intersection of both with public records law.

Although I have served on several professional and institutional committees before, this would be my first involvement with an SAA sections or roundtables. I am particularly interested in web archiving policy and in the future place of social media archiving in web archiving.

Jessica Venlet
As an early career professional, I’m interested in becoming more involved in SAA. The Web Archiving Roundtable secretary position is an excellent opportunity not only to contribute to SAA, but also to become more engaged in the web archiving community. I have experience organizing and managing meetings and notes for working groups. I often gravitate to this type of role and feel that well organized and documented meetings encourage creativity and productivity! I currently work as the Library Fellow for Digital Archives at MIT Libraries. I earned a Master of Science in Information degree from the University of Michigan. As part of the MIT Libraries Institute Archives team, I work on a wide range of projects for acquisition, processing, and preservation of digital content. Web archiving has emerged as a central part of my fellowship experience as I have taken a lead role in researching and exploring web archiving strategies for the Archives. I would love to extend my participation in the Web Archiving Roundtable by serving on the Steering Committee.

Weekly web archiving roundup: November 6, 2015

Here’s the weekly web archiving roundup for November 6, 2015:

  • LOL Nothing Matters–A Defense of the Internet’s Absence of Meaning: “The most profound feeling of cultural participation for me comes from trawling databases.”
  • Life Beyond Status Updates–The History Project Wants To Create Modern Time CapsulesThe History Project seeks to allow users to shape the narrative of their digital footprint.
    • Live URL
    • Archived URL–This page couldn’t be captured.
  • What Will Become of Grantland’s Archives? As the website goes under, the Internet Archive is saving as much as it can.
  • Being a Small-Time Software Contributor–Non-Developers IncludedSmall scale ways to support OpenWayback.
  • iPRES2015 Trip ReportJustin F. Brunelle offers an eyewitness report on the doings at iPres 2015 at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
  • Call for Participation–Archives UnleashedWeb Archive Hackathon scheduled for March 3-6, 2016, in Toronto.