Page 84 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014Similar to Columbia University, University of Alberta also realized that the university was not capturing born‐digital material and that it needed to include web archiving in its digital preservation strategy. However, the university did not start out with such a clear vision. Originally, the University of Alberta in‐ herited over 80 websites from a non‐profit organiza‐ tion that lost its funding. Realizing that hosting the‐ se websites would be resource intensive, the univer‐ sity took an “archiving” approach, which they felt would be a more sustainable way to take custody of the content. University of Alberta thus began using the Archive‐It application to complete this project. Their first year with Archive‐It (2009) was largely based on the websites inherited from the dissolved non‐profit organization (personal correspondence and conversation with Geoff Harder, June 2012).Montana’s state library offers an example of a diffe‐ rent institutional vision. The Montana State Library (MSL) web archive seeks to archive state docu‐ ments, which are now often only available online. Their objective is to “meet the information needs of state agency employees, provide permanent public access to state publications, support Montana libra‐ ries in delivering quality library content and services, work to strengthen Montana public libraries, and provide visually or physically handicapped Monta‐ nans access to library resources” (personal corres‐ pondence with Beth Downs, James Kammerer and Chris Stockwell, May, 2012). A Montana State Li‐ brary staff summarizes the library’s reasons for ar‐ chiving the web: “With the precipitous decline in the submission rate for print publications and an inver‐ se, exponential rise in the rate of web based publis‐ hing, Archive‐It has completely supplanted the his‐ toric state depository library tradition of acquiring and distributing print state publications one at a ti‐ me” (personal correspondence with Beth Downs, James Kammerer and Chris Stockwell, May, 2012). At the beginning of their subscription in 2007, Mon‐ tana set up one policy to govern most aspects of their web archiving program, including selection cri‐ teria for what to archive, crawl frequency, and ou‐ treach. Interactions between Archive‐It and MSL since 2007 indicate that this approach has been suc‐ cessful and is meeting the objectives of the state library.1b. Resources and WorkflowThe resources and workflow phase of the lifecycle can be interpreted in several ways. In the context of the model’s outer circle, institutions examine the resources and workflows that can be leveraged to create or maintain an entire institution’s web archi‐ ving program. In this way, resources and workflow can be considered similarly to “policy”, as they can be applied in multiple areas of the web archiving life cycle model. Resources and workflow should also be considered as general program management terms that can be applied to each of the elements in the model’s inner ring. In this context resources and workflow become part of the day‐to‐ day activitiesStarting in 2010, the University of Alberta began using Archive‐It as a broader collection development tool. The development of national web archiving programs is notas strong in Ca‐nada as it is insome othercountries. Tohelp fill this gap,the universitylibrary has be‐gun collecting inearnest in several areas, including but not limited to: Canadian prairie politics and economics, govern‐ ment documents, grey literature for business and health sciences, circumpolar studies, and provincial education curriculum materials. In this way, the vi‐ sion of their Archive‐It program matches their co‐ llection development policy for their non‐digital co‐ llections. Two of their big issues moving forward relate to refining their discovery strategy and impro‐ ving the visibility of their collections. They are parti‐ cularly interested in out how to most effectively provi‐ de access to their web archives alongside other digital collections Because the university is concerned with digital scholarship, they want to make sure researchers are able to use their web archive collections just as they now use other resources (personal correspondence and conversation with Geoff Harder, June 2012).AC/EInstitutions archive Web content for many different reasons and aims according to their digital conservation strategyWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 7: THE WEB ARCHIVING LIFE CYCLE MODEL CURRENT PAGE...84