Historical Infrastructures for Web Archiving: Annotation of Ephemeral Collections for Researchers of Cultural Heritage Institutions

Historical Infrastructures for Web Archiving: Annotation of Ephemeral Collections for Researchers of Cultural Heritage Institutions

Web Archiving

Archivists, historians, and scholars agree that the accumulation of data circulating daily on the Web should be preserved. Yet, there are inconsistencies and gaps in the type of access to web archives created by various academic, public, and private institutions. Authors Dougherty and van den Heuvel explain web archives constructed by institutions such as the Internet Archive or the Library of Congress are designed primarily for retrieval of content in contrast to more specialized academic web archives that focus on data mining and discovery. The authors suggest all web archiving programs expand the annotations in the metadata to include multiple sources and digital ephemera (including the advertising, blogging, and tagging typically ignored by web crawlers). They refer to both Wikipedia and to a nineteenth century historian as models for recording origins, versions, and composing thick descriptions written for each item. By rendering this extensive metadata transparent and making it accessible for all types of users, web archives can provide the cyberstructure suitable for both e-research and e-heritage.

Dougherty, Meghan

Heuvel, Charles van den

MIT6

2009

Polk, Victoria

Document

http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit6/papers/Dougherty_Heuvel.pdf

Dougherty, Meghan and Charles van den Heuvel. "Historical Infrastructures for Web Archiving: Annotation of Ephemeral Collections for Researchers of Cultural Heritage Institutions." Research paper presented at the MIT6 Conference, Boston, MA, May 2009.