The Web-at-Risk at Three: Overview of an NDIIPP Web Archiving Initiative

The Web-at-Risk project is a multi-year National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) funded effort to enable librarians and archivists to capture, curate, and preserve political and government information on the Web, and to make the resulting Web archives available to researchers. The Web-at-Risk project is a collaborative effort between the California Digital Library, New York University Libraries, the Stanford School of Computer Science, and the University of North Texas Libraries. Web-at-Risk is a multifaceted project that involves software development, integration of open-source solutions, and extensive needs assessment and collection planning work with the project’s curatorial partners. A major outcome of this project is the Web Archiving Service (WAS), a Web archiving curatorial tool developed at the California Digital Library. This paper will examine both the Web-at-Risk project overall, how Web archiving fits into existing collection development practices, and the Web Archiving Service workflow, features, and technical approach. Issues addressed will include how the reliance on existing technologies both benefited and hindered the project, and how curator feedback shaped WAS design. Finally, the challenges faced and future directions for the project will be examined. Web-at-Risk Grant Background The fate of born-digital documents delivered via the Web is precarious. During the last several years, a number of studies have examined the impact of Web references in the scholarly literature of a number of academic fields, and tracked the disappearance of cited references. These The Web-at-Risk at Three: Overview of an NDIIPP Web Archiving Initiative