Journal of Western Archives Special Issue on Web Archiving

The Archive-It staff loves to see web archiving highlighted in archival literature. The Journal of Western Archives (JWA) did just that in a recent special issue on web archiving, guest edited by Nicholas Taylor. Taylor uses his introduction to take stock of the current state of web archiving, about which he observes that, while there’s never been more activity, the need to preserve Web information has also never been greater. There is something for everyone in this thoughtful compilation.

• Ears were burning at Archive-It headquarters thanks to Alston Cobourn’s informative essay, “Case Study: Washington and Lee’s First Year Using Archive-It,” in which she outlines the experience of launching a web archiving program using our service and writes cogently about lessons learned and future directions.

• “Collaboration Made It Happen! The Kansas Archive-It Consortium,” offers readers an instructive glimpse into the benefits and considerations of the consortial approach to curation and acquisition of web content.

• In “Using RSS to Improve Web Harvest Results for News Web Sites,” practitioners at the Library of Congress highlight the necessity of an iterative methodology and demonstrate how a creative multi-pronged approach dramatically improved the completeness of their captures.

• The co-authors of “Developing Web Archiving Metadata Best Practices to Meet User Needs” provide a timely update on the OCLC Web Archiving Metadata (WAM) Working Group’s efforts to profile best descriptive practices for web archives.

JWA is an open access journal available for free online and you can download the special issue here. This issue is a great opportunity to reflect on how far web archiving has come, be inspired by your colleagues’ projects and move forward facing the challenges that accompany our roles as custodians of online content.