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WAS Service Update – October 2012

November 6, 2012 Author: Rosalie LackCategories:

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

  • Work continues on the WAS 2.0 release and the WAS public interface redesign.
  • iPRES 2012: WAS Service Manager, Rosalie Lack, attended the iPRES 2012 Conference. Of the sessions dedicated to web archiving, of particular interest was a panel that included several national libraries, university libraries, the Internet Archive and Library of Congress discussing their web archiving programs and the challenges. Below is a brief summary of the challenges that were discussed. There were no real surprises, but it was interesting to learn that these challenges are common across all these institutions. They included: sheer size of the archives makes all tasks and management more difficult; many formats remain problematic for crawlers (e.g., streaming video, JavaScript, deep web, flash, Youtube); QA of crawled sites is still a very manual process; robots.txt (honor or override); collection development has not always been clearly defined (what you collect and what you don’t); there is a lack of use cases for how the archives are being used by scholars, students and the public; web archives are not well integrated with other collections; and there still remains a lack of widespread appreciation for the urgency of saving websites. International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) and its members (CDL is an IIPC member) are actively working on many of these issues. Despite the challenges, there were many success stories shared of growing archives and increased interest in and use of them. More info about iPRES: (https://ipres.ischool.utoronto.ca/) and about IIPC http://netpreserve.org/.

New public content: Michigan Historical Collections Web Archives

The Bentley Historical Library’s Web Archiving initiative has released over 100 sites in the Michigan Historical Collection Web Archives. The topics of the sites include historically-significant religious, governmental, educational, cultural, and activist organizations and institutions around Michigan.
Available here: http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/MichHistColl

WAS Activity, October 2012

  • 1791 archives actively collected
  • 2246 sites collected
  • 1.2 TB of data collected

WAS Service Description

The Web Archiving Service (WAS) enables librarians, archivists and researchers to capture, curate and preserve websites and web‐published materials. WAS makes it easy to build web archives, with scheduling and other tools to help manage your archive. You control public access to your archives and can configure the appearance and navigation of each archive. We also provide collection development consultation and help desk support for web archiving questions.

WAS Service Manager

Rosalie Lack, rosalie.lack@ucop.edu or washelp@ucop.edu

Additional WAS Information (training materials, videos, guides, etc.) More information about WAS is available at http://was.cdlib.org or by sending an inquiry to washelp@ucop.edu.