Page 91 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2014

AC/E digital culture ANNUAL REPORT 2014GREY BAND ‐ METADATA AND DESCRIPTIONthat 60% of partners create both collection and seed metadata. Some partners, such as Columbia Universi‐ ty, generate a significant amount of metadata for their Archive‐It collections and work with Archive‐It to chan‐ ge and expand the application’s metadata functionali‐ ty. While past statistics on metadata generation are not available, the Archive‐It team believes based on anec‐ dotal evidence that the rates at which partners are creating metadata have grown. The Marquette survey corroborates these findings. The survey asked how Ar‐ chive‐It partners use the descriptive features of the ap‐ plication. Key findings from the survey include: 35% of respondents prepare metadata at the collection level beyond the required description field; 35% do not. 81% of respondents do not prepare metadata for individual documents captured by Archive‐It crawls. 75% of those who do prepare metadata for in‐ dividual documents generate it manually as opposed to scraping it from the site. A majority of survey respondents do not cata‐ log Archive‐It content at any level within a ca‐ talog record (collection, seed, document) (Sweetster, 2011).AC/EOverall, the Marquette survey authors believe that one of the major outcomes of their work is the sug‐ gestion that Archive‐It partners are not generating metadata for their collections in the Archive‐It appli‐ cation itself. Sweetster offers three possible reasons for this: “organizations just haven’t yet gotten around to preparing metadata in Archive‐It and are still in their infancy in terms of their web archiving efforts. Organizations do not believe that metadata is warranted or useful to be created [and] organiza‐ tions are focusing their metadata creation practices in areas outside the Archive‐It platform” (Sweetster, 2011).3. The Inner CircleThe preceding life cycle phases have been part of the outer circle of the model, which relate to the broader questions around creating and defining an institutional web archiving program. The remaining phases of the model, or those in the inner circle, des‐ cribe the day‐to‐ day activities of managing a web archiving program.3a. Appraisal and Select ionThe appraisal and selection phase of web archiving involves choosing specific websites for capture. This step involves more granular, specific decision points than the broader “vision and objectives” policy pha‐ se of the lifecycle. In creating policy, institutions en‐ vision overarching plans for the entire program, such as what subjects will be included in the collecting activities. In the appraisal and selection phase, however, institutions choose the specific URLs they will archive. (10) As the forthcoming examples indi‐ cate, these choices can be made in a variety of ways, with different types of individuals contributing.State archives and libraries, for example, typically focus their web archiving efforts exclusively on state agency websites and collect those URLs. This is true of Montana State Library, the State Library of North Carolina and the State Archives of North Carolina. However, in the case of North Carolina, they alsoWHERE WE ARE HEADING: DIGITAL TRENDS IN THE WORLD OF CULTURETHEME 7: THE WEB ARCHIVING LIFE CYCLE MODEL CURRENT PAGE...91