Page 81 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014WEB ARCHIVING LIFE CYCLE MODELDEVELOPING THE WEB ARCHIVING LIFE CYCLE MODELThe Archive‐It team developed the model organica‐ lly, using feedback and lessons learned from organi‐ zations archiving the web. The majority of these or‐ ganizations use the Archive‐It service to archive web content for their organization. These partner institu‐ tions provide feedback based on their use of the ser‐ vice, communicated to the Internet Archive through email, phone calls, and in‐person conversations at conferences and partner meetings.Additionally, more formal feedback comes through partner presentations at conferences, surveys desig‐ ned by Archive‐It staff, as well as partner presenta‐ tions at conferences and documentation relating how they and their colleagues meet the challenges of web archiving.The Archive‐It team drafted the first iteration of the Web Archiving Life Cycle Model. This preliminary design was circulated to a subset of Archive‐It part‐ ners who provided feedback on missing or super‐AC/Efluous elements and on the model’s visual presenta‐ tion. Next, the Archive‐It team incorporated this input into a more graphically pleasing model that was sent to all Archive‐ It partners for general feed‐ back. This feedback shaped a further re‐design and the resulting version of the model discussed in this paper. The information in this paper is also based on in‐ depth email exchanges and phone interviews with six Archive‐It partners between April and July 2012. These institutions are: Columbia University, University of Alberta, Montana State Library, State Library of North Carolina, State Archives of North Carolina and Creighton University. Information in this paper also comes from a survey of Archive‐It partners conducted in August 2012.THE MODEL EXPLAINEDThe model is an attempt to distill the different steps and phases an institution experiences as they deve‐ lop and manage their web archiving program. Alt‐ hough the model is broken down into individual steps, each action is not discrete. Archive‐It consi‐ ders the steps and phases to be related, with a signi‐ ficant amount of overlap between them.The shape ofthe rnodel is circular to suggest the re‐ petitive nature ofthe stepe inthe life cycle. As users move through each step, theyeventuallyfmd them‐ selves back at the beginning, or repeating certain stepe, depending on their tasks. For example, the process can restar!when an institution adds new websites toan existing collection or ereatesan enti‐ relynew collection. The rnodel includes circles within circles lo suggest these repetitive cycles within the bigger process.The outermost level of the life cycle is the policy band. Almost every aspect of web archiving involves some sort of policy decision. These policy decisions may involve developing a new policy specific to web archiving or the adaptation of an existing policy to new situations. By encompassing the life cycle steps with a policy band, the model visually represents the ever‐ present nature of policy making. In a second band, the model similarly represents metadata andWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 7: THE WEB ARCHIVING LIFE CYCLE MODEL CURRENT PAGE...81