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Keeping MIT’s Online Presence – Web Archiving

At MIT Libraries, we’ve been building our Web archiving program slowly but to good effect. Here is a brief video of a presentation I prepared for the MIT Libraries Visiting Committee this week. It gives an up to date summary of where we are and how we are building our Web archiving program.

During 2015-2016 Library Fellow for Digital Archives, Jessica Venlet, conducted research studies and experiments in our Digital Sustainability Lab, contributed to WA meatadata description work, and captured select MIT-created Web content that the Institute Archives was asked to preserve by the creating office.  Her blog posts give more detail on some of her work in 2015.

I’ve been working to build our program, which is under the umbrella of the Program for Born-digital Archives in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.  To this end, we received an internal Libraries collections fund grant to subscribe to the Archive-It service and engage in collection building activities as a project with an evaluation component.

Most recently, I participated in the National Symposium on Web Archives Interoperability hosted by the Internet Archive that brought together a diverse group of about 50 engineers, archivists, researchers, and others for a technology-oriented agenda focused on building tools and communities that support interoperable web archiving systems. The meeting included demonstrations of APIs to transfer WARCs, metadata and crawl information, and related tools that have been created or improved for Web archiving, research, and access capabilities. Read the trip report written by Michael Nelson in the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group at ODU.

If you are interested in using MIT Web archives or know of specific MIT-created Web content that you think should be archived by the Institute Archives, please contact us.