The Library of Congress have recently made their US Election 2004 Web Archive available from the Library of Congress Web Archives site. The Election 2004 Web Archive is a selective collection of approximately 2,000 Web sites associated with the United States Presidential, Congressional, and gubernatorial elections. It is part of a continuing effort by the Library’s Web Archiving Project Minerva to evaluate, select, collect, catalogue, provide access to, and preserve digital materials for future generations of researchers.

The archived material includes blogs (such as blogs for Bush). Currently permission is necessary for offsite access for researchers. All archived Web sites are available to researchers onsite at the Library of Congress.

Metadata

At the Library of Congress they are currently providing metadata for individual Web sites through brief records using the MODS schema. There is a MARC collection level record (for the collection itself) with a link to an entry/overview page for each collection that links to search and browse functions with MODS metadata for each individual Web site that was collected.

An overview of their metadata approach (at the collection and item levels) is available. They are also in the process of developing more formal descriptive metadata profiles for their digital content and have developed one for the Library of Congress Web archives.

For a list of publicly available Library of Congress Web archives and access to each, see the Library of Congress Web Archives site.

More information on activities at the Library of Congress are given in a Powerpoint presentation given at the Digital Library Federation 2008 Fall Forum.

We recently published a blog post about the workshop on “missing links: the enduring web”. Further information about this one-day event, which will take place on 21^st July 2009 at the British Library Conference Centre, London, is now available.

Papers and posters are invited which address long term preservation issues in relation to Web content. Abstracts of not more than 300 words should be sent to the conference organisers by 8^th May 2009.

The dangers of reliance of externally-hosted Web 2.0 services has been mentioned previously. And there have been recent incidents in which companies have given a short period of notice of impending closure of services, with users having little time to migrate their data to alternative providers. A recent article in The Guardian (Thursday 2 April 2009)  entitled “Can I assume that my online data is safe for ever?” addressed such concerns in an article on the closure of the Filefront.com service, who gave their users just 5 days to migrate their data.

Coincidentally I recently received the following email from a service I subscribe to:

Our previous request to you to provide a new owner for the  list has not produced a response.  Therefore, we assume the list is no longer useful and aim to close it in one week’s time.
We would be happy to provide a zipped copy of the archives and any files on deletion of the list, should they be required.

In this case it appears that the service has been little used for over a year. And yet what if useful information is still available on the service? Is a week’s notice enough for users of the service to consider the implications of this decision, identify appropriate solutions and then implement them? And let’s not forget that this email was sent outside of term time when researchers could be away.

The email did not make it clear if data was to be deleted, the service was to continue to be made available in a read-only mode or the interface to the data hidden - all possible solutions if it is felt necessary for a little-used service to be withdrawn.

There’s still a need to establish the best practices when Web-based interfaces to services are to be removed, I feel. And such issues do not just affect the third party services outside of our community.

The Digital Preservation Coalition have recently announced a 1-day workshop on “missing links: the enduring web” which will be held at the British Library Conference Centre on 21^st July 2009. This event, which is being organised by the JISC and the UK Web Archiving Consortium in conjunction with the Digital Preservation Coalition, aims to “bring together key stakeholders – web managers, archive managers, preservation experts, national libraries, web archivists and content providers - for practical and focussed discussion on shared perspectives, requirements, problems and solutions. Formal presentations and case studies will be presented with an opportunity for posters and demonstrations of tools“.

We will provide information on the detailed programme and how to register when this information is published.