Access the Complete Issue (2 pages; PDF)

This Issue Includes:

+ News of 2009 Best Practices Exchange and the Preserving Digital News meeting

+ An article about a Digital Preservation Workshop held at the Library of Congress

+ The Netherlands Coalition for Digital Preservation sponsored a national conference and published an interim report

+ Government Computer News recognizes NDIIPP among the best of Federal information technology initiatives of 2009

+ New guidelines for content categories and digitization objectives published by the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative

+ An interview podcast about the DuraSpace pilot project is available from Federal News Radio

Source; National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) / Library of Congress

Access Full Issue

Articles Include:

+ Profile of Digital Preservation Pioneer David Riecks

+ An article about recently published white papers on preserving digital legislative data

+ LOCKSS Chief Scientist David Rosenthal speaks at Library of Congress

+ An article about the K-12 Web Archiving Program

+ Library of Congress digital initiatives profiled in Library Journal

+ News of the 2009 SAA annual meeting and Saving Public Policy Web Content meeting

+ Upcoming Events: iPres 2009 and the Cultural Heritage Online Conference

Source: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress

A few weeks ago we posted about the new California Digital Library Public Web Archive Service Collections.

Today, via DigitalKoans we learn of another web archiving service named WAX at Harvard University.

From the Web Site:

The public interface for Harvard’s new Web Archive Collection Service (WAX) launched on February 4, 2009. WAX began as a pilot project in July 2006, funded by the University’s Library Digital Initiative (LDI) to address the management of web sites by collection managers for long-term archiving. It was the first LDI project specifically oriented toward preserving “born-digital” material. WAX has now transitioned to a production system supported by the University Library’s central infrastructure.

Collection managers, working in the online environment, must continue to acquire the content that they have always collected physically. With blogs supplanting diaries, e-mail supplanting traditional correspondence, and HTML materials supplanting many forms of print collateral, collection managers have grown increasingly concerned about potential gaps in the documentation of our cultural heritage.

WAX was developed as an initial–and only partial–response to these and other concerns, which range from technical feasibility to legal and financial implications. The pilot focused on harvesting content from the surface web–content that is discoverable to search engines through web crawlers, as opposed to content hidden from web crawlers in a database or restricted by password or login protection.

Review the WAX Collections

Much More about WAX from DigitalKoans

Source: WAX, DigitalKoans

Note: Of course, don’t forget about The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive (IA). It’s now home to over 150 billion archived web pages. The IA also does “custom” web archiving via their very cool Archive-It service.

And yet another role for the information professional.

From the Article:

The Executive Office of the President (EOP) plans to hire a company to help archive the ever-expanding amount of data that qualifies as presidential records that the office publishes on publicly accessible Web sites and social networking sites, according to a recently published solicitation notice.

The EOP wants a contractor to capture and store content posted on the sites that the administration is required to maintain under the Presidential Records Act (PRA), the notice said. According to the request for quote (RFQ) notice, the contractor will also be responsible for transferring the captured data to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for historical preservation.

[Snip]

White House officials want the company to crawl and archive PRA content on third-party Web sites where the EOP maintains a presence, such as the White House’s Facebook page and Twitter feed, the notice said. According to the RFQ, the EOP wants data capture to be automatic rather than how it’s currently done.

White House officials want the company to crawl and archive PRA content on third-party Web sites where the EOP maintains a presence, such as the White House’s Facebook page and Twitter feed, the notice said. According to the RFQ, the EOP wants data capture to be automatic rather than how it’s currently done.

EOP officials want to capture the posted content at least twice a day, the notice said. In addition, they said the vendor will have to make the data organized and searchable and provide a Web-based tool that government employees can use to manage the record-keeping.

The data will also need to be stored in a way that will let NARA ingest the records into the agency’s next-generation Electronic Records Archives system.

Access the Complete Solicitation (PDF)

Source: FCW

From the Article:

In a vault beneath the British Library here, Jeremy Leighton John grapples with a formidable challenge in digital life. Dr. John, the library’s first curator of eManuscripts, is working on ways to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today’s discoveries and better understand the people who made them.

His task is only getting harder. Scientists who collaborate via email, Google, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them. Computer-intensive experiments and the software used to analyze their output generate millions of gigabytes of data that are stored or retrieved by electronic systems that quickly become obsolete.

Source: Wall Street Journal
Hat Tip: ACM Tech News

From a Blog Post:

Yahoo! announced that it will close the site on October 26, 2009, steering users towards their paid service instead. We have been archiving GeoCities sites for years in our crawls, but, as goes with the territory of being web archivists, we want to make sure to gather as many of the sites as possible before the looming end of an era, 10-26-2009. If you have a page with GeoCities or are a fan of a particular page, please use our special collections page to ensure its preservation. Additionally, please refer to the Archive Team’s efforts to save cultural information that may be lost with the site closing. Yahoo! is also offering valuable advice at their help center.

Source: Internet Archive

From the Article:

A rich but dusty archive of South Carolina history — newspapers published throughout the state from 1860 to 1922 — will become Web accessible through the S.C. Digital Newspaper Project, an initiative of University Libraries.

The project, funded with a two-year $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), will scan, enhance, and deliver to the Library of Congress an estimated 100,000 pages of selected S.C. newspaper titles. The resulting online archive will reflect major artistic, literary, religious, ethnic, cultural, economic, and political events in South Carolina and surrounding states.

Source: University of South Carolina

Yesterday, we posted: Digital Preservation: LOCKSS Chief Scientist David Rosenthal Speaks at Library of Congress. The post contained links to slides and several related documents but not the video of Rosenthal’s presentation.

Today, the video was made available on the LC web site. You can view it here. The video runs 76 minutes.

Source: Library of Congress

From the Summary

When David Rosenthal talks, people listen. They may not always agree with the Chief Scientist of the LOCKSS program based at Stanford University, but they engage with what he has to say.

This was the case on July 27, 2009, when a large crowd gathered at the Library of Congress to hear Rosenthal’s presentation How Are We Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents? (pdf, 321 Kb). Rosenthal’s talk was a reprise of his widely-discussed plenary at the Spring 2009 Coalition for Networked Information Task Force meeting. In his introduction at the CNI meeting, CNI Executive Director Clifford Lynch told the audience that Rosenthal’s work had changed his thinking about digital preservation.

+ Rosenthal’s presentation at the Library was filmed and will soon be available as a webcast. Update: The video (76 minutes) is now available.

+ Ensuring the Longevity of Digital Documents? (2009): Presentation Slides (PDF):

Source: NDIIPP, Library of Congress