As the internet evolves and changes, what material of the internet's past will continue to be available? What is being actively preserved for the future, and who is doing this work? In this session I'll discuss my doctoral research project that explores these questions through two cases studies of web archiving by national libraries and academic research libraries which are part of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. These cases are representative of the many web archiving initiatives and practices tied to existing centralized structures - supported by government and academic institutions, as well as methods of crawling tied to infrastructures like country code top-level domains. These institutional efforts can be seen to contrast with distributed communities like Archiveteam as well as activist and community web archives. And increasingly, individual people can also create and curate their own collections with tools like webrecorder.io that are geared towards users who are not coders.
These examples of individual, institutional and community-based efforts in archiving the web will be used as a jumping-off point to discuss the tensions around trust, longevity, and distributed and decentralized initiatives in web archiving. While many individual savers / saviours are seen to move more quickly than institutions with the rapid pace of change and content on the web at risk of loss, can institutions with more traditional approaches provide perspective on the long view? What combination of DIY and DIWO is needed to archive and preserve in a way that keeps up with changes in the broader internet landscape - SEO, dynamic web, social media, mobile apps. What can be learned from web archives and applied to archives for other networked media and communications?
Exploring how defining the objects of preservation are tied to social, technical and cultural contexts.
Taking a historical perspective to examine design decisions for longevity.
Interested in attending the sprint July 16-18: [Y]
Interested in a community billet: [N]
Presenter Bio
Emily Maemura is a doctoral candidate in her fourth year of study at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information (iSchool). She is interested in approaches and methods for research with web archives data and collections, and in capturing diverse perspectives of the internet as an object and/or site of study.
Web Archiving as DIY and DIWO
Description
As the internet evolves and changes, what material of the internet's past will continue to be available? What is being actively preserved for the future, and who is doing this work? In this session I'll discuss my doctoral research project that explores these questions through two cases studies of web archiving by national libraries and academic research libraries which are part of the International Internet Preservation Consortium. These cases are representative of the many web archiving initiatives and practices tied to existing centralized structures - supported by government and academic institutions, as well as methods of crawling tied to infrastructures like country code top-level domains. These institutional efforts can be seen to contrast with distributed communities like Archiveteam as well as activist and community web archives. And increasingly, individual people can also create and curate their own collections with tools like webrecorder.io that are geared towards users who are not coders.
These examples of individual, institutional and community-based efforts in archiving the web will be used as a jumping-off point to discuss the tensions around trust, longevity, and distributed and decentralized initiatives in web archiving. While many individual savers / saviours are seen to move more quickly than institutions with the rapid pace of change and content on the web at risk of loss, can institutions with more traditional approaches provide perspective on the long view? What combination of DIY and DIWO is needed to archive and preserve in a way that keeps up with changes in the broader internet landscape - SEO, dynamic web, social media, mobile apps. What can be learned from web archives and applied to archives for other networked media and communications?
Type: talk
Length: <30 minutes Additional considerations: None
Session Objective
Exploring how defining the objects of preservation are tied to social, technical and cultural contexts. Taking a historical perspective to examine design decisions for longevity.
Material and Technical Requirements
Projector and screen.
Presenter(s)
Name: Emily Maemura
Email: e.maemura@mail.utoronto.ca
Url(s): emilymaemura.com Twitter: @emilymaemura GitHub: @emilymae
Interested in attending the sprint July 16-18: [Y]
Interested in a community billet: [N]
Presenter Bio
Emily Maemura is a doctoral candidate in her fourth year of study at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information (iSchool). She is interested in approaches and methods for research with web archives data and collections, and in capturing diverse perspectives of the internet as an object and/or site of study.