Preservation Services Hosts Regional Web Archiving Meetup

August 12, 2019

On August 12, 2019, Harvard Library Preservation Services hosted a New England regional meetup of Archive-It (AIT) subscribers at Lamont Library. Archive-It is a subscription service for large-scale web archiving offered by the Internet Archive. HL has been an AIT subscriber since 2018, when the Library’s local WAX web archiving infrastructure was decommissioned. Internationally, AIT has over 600 institutional subscribers, and organizes an annual subscribers meeting generally scheduled in conjunction with the SAA conference (held earlier this month in Austin, TX). In addition to this, however, AIT is eager to encourage and support other, smaller regional meetings, particularly to provide opportunities for enhanced community engagement by those not able to attend the SAA-based meeting. Preservation Services was happy to sponsor this inaugural edition of the New England regional meeting. Response by the participants was uniformly positive, with all expressing a desire for similar future events.

The meetup was attended by representatives from 16 academic, nonprofit, and cultural memory institutions in the greater New England area, including Boston College, Bowdoin, Brown, Clark Art Institute, Connecticut State Library, Dartmouth, Legacy Winchester, Marine Biological Laboratory, Middlebury, MIT, Phillips Academy, Rhode Island Office of Library and Information Services, Union of Concerned Scientists, West Hartford Public Library, WGBH, and Yale. Harvard was represented by 18 staff from across HL units, including curators responsible for a number of significant public AIT collections and meetup hosts Stephen Abrams, Head of Digital Preservation, and Tricia Patterson, Digital Preservation Analyst, from Preservation Services. Lori Donovan, Senior Program Manager, and Karl Blumenthal, Web Archivist, from the Archive-It team also flew in for the day. We are grateful for their critical participation.

The half-day agenda included sessions providing an update on the AIT service and its future plans from Donovan and Blumenthal; case studies and reports about the IMLS-funded Community Webs public library program from Agatha Monahan at the West Hartford Public Library, Schlesinger Library’s #metoo collection from Jennifer Weintraub, the joint CDL/Harvard/UCLA Cobweb platform for collaborative web archiving collection development from Abrams, and the 2018 National Forum on Ethics and Archiving the Web from Andrea Puccio at the Clark Art Institute. The day concluded with breakout discussions focusing on an introductory overview to using AIT, collection development best practices, quality assurance best practices, and advanced AIT features. All sessions featured extensive Q&A, lively discussion, and extensive sharing of the rich and diverse experiences of the meeting participants.

The HL partner relationship with Archive-It is managed for Preservation Service by Abrams and Patterson. They also participate on the Web Archiving Advisory Group (WAAG) to help coordinate, promote, and sustain web archiving activity across HL as a core programmatic function of its acquisition and stewardship of digital material crucial to the fulfilment of the University’s scholarly mission.

By Stephen Abrams, Head of Digital Preservation