Page 89 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014THE OUTER CIRCLE ‐ PRESERVATIONBased on a recent survey completed by Archive‐It partners, partners do want to preserve their data and have multiple copies of their data in multiple locations. However, they are grappling with how to get there. In the survey, 56% of respondents answe‐ red that they would like to archive their data in their own local repository (regardless of the platform they use).However, 31% of partners reported that they prefer to store their data at the Internet Archive, either be‐ cause they are satisfied with that strategy or do not have the means to preserve the data elsewhere. Ap‐ proximately 60% of respondents do not yet have a local digital repository. The two highest cited rea‐ sons for not having a repository are “unsure of our needs” and “weighing which system to choose”. These results along with anecdotal information gat‐ hered over the years from Archive‐It partners stron‐ gly suggest that partners are grappling with issues of how to preserve the data they collect from web archiving, and one can expect substantial develop‐ ments in this area of the model in the coming years.AC/E1e. Risk ManagementIn developing a web archiving program, many insti‐ tutions consider the level of risk related to copyright they are willing to accept and how they will manage this risk. Whether and how institutions decide to seek permission from site owners before archiving is one of the clearest examples of risk management policy making in action. The Archive‐It service has long used robots.txt (an easy‐to‐use technological solution) as a permissions management tool, which provides an automatic way for site owners to exclu‐ de their sites from the archiving process. In addition to the robots.txt protocol, Archive‐It partners some‐ times seek out website owners to get written per‐ mission before beginning to harvest.For example Columbia University contacts site ow‐ ners directly, and formally asks permission to archi‐ ve websites before they begin their harvests. This is a multi‐week process in which the site owner is con‐ tacted twice. If there is no response to the first con‐ tact after three weeks, the Columbia team sends a follow up message. If they still do not hear anything after an additional three weeks, they proceed with the harvest. Overall, Columbia’s response rate is 52%: of 783 sites contacted, 400 responded and granted permission, 378 did not respond, and only 5 site owners have responded negatively asking that their sites not be archived (personal correspondence with Alex Thurman, February, 2013). Similarly, the University of Alberta selectively asks permission for sites they archive. This decision was based on dis‐ cussions with their legal department who gave them a “risk threshold” to follow, and they ask permission when they feel the need to stay within this threshold (personal correspondence and conversation with Geoff Harder, June 27, 2012 ).Risk management decisions can also be seen in the choices institutions make when deciding which sites to archive. Originally, the State Library of North Ca‐ rolina and the State Archive of North Carolina co‐ llected only state agency websites. However, in 2009, they started collecting the feeds of state agencies on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr. Despite the fact that the contentWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 7: THE WEB ARCHIVING LIFE CYCLE MODEL CURRENT PAGE...89