Cobweb Call for Participation and Metadata

Greetings, fellow Archive-It Partners!

Are you interested in collaborative approaches to web archiving? Cobweb is a platform that supports collaborative web archiving collection development, and is currently being built by the California Digital Library, UCLA, and Harvard University with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. With many thanks to Archive-It, I shared a presentation on Cobweb at last month’s Partner Meeting describing development of this tool that supports the coordinated work of building thematic web archives. We’re looking forward to launching the Cobweb sandbox very soon!

The functions Cobweb will support include:

- establishing thematic web archiving collecting projects,

- nominating web resources for capture,

- claiming nominated web resources with an intention to capture them, and

- reporting on web resources that have been captured.

All of this information will form a community registry that will be searchable by anyone looking to either grow web archives or find archived web resources useful to their research.

You can help grow the Cobweb registry of descriptions of archived web resources! We are seeking metadata describing web resources that have already been crawled and have started with metadata made publicly available through Archive-It’s OAI-PMH feed. However, not all Archive-It collections have been set to share descriptive metadata via the Archive-It OAI-PMH feed. For any of your Archive-It collections, once you’re at the “Metadata” tab of a collections admin panel in Archive-It, checking the “OAI-PMH Export” box to “Export metadata to OAI-PMH (including WorldCat)” will make your descriptive metadata available to be harvested and included in the Cobweb registry. By including your metadata in the Cobweb registry, your holdings will be made publicly discoverable in a platform that facilitates researchers and collection managers in better understanding and addressing cross-institutional opportunities to extend and enhance research and collecting, for example, by analyzing strengths and gaps across a range of collections.

Please be in touch with me (kathryn.stine@ucop.edu) if you are interested in playing with Cobweb prototype functionality and want to get set up with the Cobweb sandbox, have questions, or just want to learn more about Cobweb!