Page 90 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014THE OUTER CIRCLE ‐ RISK MANAGEMENTwas on a third‐party website and not controlled by a North Carolina state agency, the archivists and libra‐ rians made the decision to move forwardwith the archiving after weighing the potential risks and outcomes (personal correspondence with Kelly Eubank, Lisa Gregory, Kathleen Kenney, and Rachel Trent, June 2012).Not all organizations ask for permission before cap‐ turing content; and many organizations are clear that as an archive and/or a library, their organiza‐ tions has the right and the mandate to capture pu‐ blicly available content on the live web. Fair use and fair game are two phrases the Archive‐It team hears from partners when deciding to capture publicly available web content. In many cases an organization’s mandate extends to include ignoring robots.txt on CSS and style sheets so the archived web page renders completely. And in other cases this policy includes researchers and historians captu‐ ring documents and/or websites to be able to pre‐ sent an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of a subject matter, with is increasingly including publi‐ cly available content on social media sites.AC/ERisk can be managed and mitigated preemptively; and sometimes institutions may also need to ad‐ dress potential issues that come up after archiving of content has taken place. At Creighton University, a photographer became upset that his website had been archived, despite the fact that the site was part of the larger university web space and was therefore crawled per University records management policy. Creighton decided to remove the website from the archive and worked with the Archive‐It team to handle the issue, and the content was removed wit‐ hin hours. Since then, Creighton has decided that if there is a risk of embarrassment or litigation, they will remove content from the web archive (conversation with David Crawford, July, 2012).Note: The Archive‐It service does not take a stand on copyright; and follows the Oakland Archive Poli‐ cy, established in 2002, striving to work collaborati‐ vely with content providers. The service will honor requests to remove content from public access.2. Grey Band2a. Metadata and DescriptionBased on information from partners, the Archive‐It team concluded that the metadata and description part of the web archiving cycle, like policy, overlaps significantly with other steps of the cycle. Therefore, the decision was made to present metadata and des‐ cription as an encompassing band of the model rather than its own discrete part of the process. As with most aspects of web archiving, best practices are evolving regarding the use and creation of metadata and des‐ criptive trends for web archives. However, the Archive‐ It team can make some conclusions based on how insti‐ tutions use the metadata and description functionality in Archive‐ It. Data gathered internally by the Archive‐It team in 2011 shows that over 70% of Archive‐It part‐ ners generate collection level metadata, over 60% ge‐ nerate seed metadata, and 10% generate document level metadata. Seeds are the starting point URLs for web crawls and documents are the individually archi‐ ved web pages. Additionally, this same data showedWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 7: THE WEB ARCHIVING LIFE CYCLE MODEL CURRENT PAGE...90