webarchiving
Updates
Carnegie Hall Archives staff Kathryn Gronsbell (Digital Collections Manager) and Lisa Barrier (Digital Collections Associate) reflect on the work and lessons learned after 1.5 years of collaborating with Anna Perricci, Associate Director of Strategic Partnerships for Webrecorder at Rhizome.
Background on Collaboration
Carnegie Hall Archives’ relationship with Webrecorder began in Spring 2018. The Archives was seeking web archiving guidance for capturing a soon-to-be decommissioned website, which morphed into a conversation about the need to represent a handful of sites in the context of a performing arts non-profit’s archive. After a few months of discussion and resource-sharing, an informal partnership agreement was reached in Summer 2018 with the following goals:
Carnegie Hall Archives (CHA) will be able to build a robust web archive at a scale appropriate for their needs, with the support and guidance of web archiving experts.
Webrecorder will be able to learn from Carnegie Hall’s experience and make improvements based on their feedback and questions.
Anna, Kathryn, and Lisa laid out a set of tasks to meet these goals:
| Status | Task |
|---|---|
| Complete | Consultation on and recommendations for collection building and access,Access to new Webrecorder features (e.g. automation) for testing and feedback, priority response to support requests |
| In Progress | Finalize strategy and work plan for web archives integration with larger digital preservation program |
| To Do | Integrate web archives into larger digital preservation workflows, priority response to support requests |
Communication and Participation
We spoke to Anna for 1-2 calls/month and committed to a minimum of 1 hour/week of testing and exploring Webrecorder and expanding our web archiving strategy. Starting in Fall 2018, we organized a working group of CH staff members to discuss and plan for web archives. Staff from across the organization participated, providing feedback about general site usage, expectations of web captures and informal requirements for captured sites, and identifying the need for more education for those new to web archiving to get started.
In April 2019, we spoke about experiences using Webrecorder and initializing a web archiving conversation at METRO with the Digital Preservation Interest Meetup group (slides from that chat available here).
Benefit to Carnegie Hall Archives
The informal partnership had many mutual benefits. Exposure to web archiving expertise and guidance was a significant plus for the Archives team as we had limited experience. Among other things, Anna:
- created and maintained a Zotero library for web archiving resources;
- discussed real-life examples and scenarios from other institutions; and
- connected us with people doing similar work so that we could expand our network of ‘early stage’ web archiving practitioners.
Anna’s insight into the web archiving landscape and community aided us in establishing a fledgling understanding of how an organization’s archives could approach folding in web captures into our archival responsibilities. From the strategic to the practical, Anna made herself available to us to discuss choosing and troubleshooting the right web capture tools, the state of research and tool development in the community, and how we can realistically create and acquire archival web captures based on Carnegie Hall’s needs. Much of the conversation centered around the gap between ideal and realistic practices in web archiving, and recommendations for moving forward with the work incrementally.
The experience enabled us to open an institution-wide discussion about saving websites and web-based resources. While we are far from a formalized program or policy, the initiation of this conversation helps us understand our staff’s needs for accessing online legacy content.
Output and Outcomes
Captures
As of December 2019, we have two public and nine private Webrecorder captures. One public capture is of a decommissioned, legacy version of the Carnegie Hall Performance History Search (current PHS available here), which was captured prior to the site redesign in 2018. The second is of the education team’s Games and Listening Guides, which were also phased out with a website redesign. Both public captures have proved useful for internal reference as well as for planning and implementing new projects and sites.
Our private captures range from test captures to captures of temporary festival sites, and are also used for reference and to maintain information that is or may be repurposed. These captures are currently kept private for policy reasons, but we hope to release more to the public as we expand our work plan with the Carnegie Hall Web Archiving group.
Planning & Documentation
As we met with the working group, we created an internal SharePoint site to track notes and resources and started drafting our Workplan and Purpose Statement. Anna made sure we focused on thinking strategically about what we were attempting to do – and why. She helped us edit and define our Workplan and Purpose Statement, which we were then able to share with the working group. Anna also helped us edit and clarify a Web Archiving Primer, which we created using notes and quotes from resources she provided. This primer summarizes the web archiving process in simple and accessible terms, allowing others outside of the web archiving working group to understand how web archiving works and how it may benefit them.
We decided to openly share our Workplan and Purpose Statement, Web Archiving Primer, access to public captures, and general web archiving notes and findings on the GitHub repo and site. We use this repo and site to organize our project progress and invite others to provide feedback. We also updated our Webrecorder collections page to include links out to our GitHub and the CHA to better contextualize our captures.
Tool improvement
We spent some of our dedicated web archiving hours to testing Webrecorder functions and updates, across multiple browsers as well as across the tool’s browser options. We reported any tools that we found confusing (or easy!) to use and participated in Webrecorder tests and surveys. We want to acknowledge the work and engagement of the project developers, who followed up on our reports, suggestions, and testing. This broadened our understanding of Webrecorder and allowed us to provide useful feedback and flag user issues when necessary.
What’s Next
Looking ahead, we will continue:
- Using the public captures as internal and external resources;
- Working on the strategy and plan for integrating web archiving activities into our Digital Collections maintenance and access work; and
- Keeping involved and informed about how individuals and organizations are adjusting their archival workflows to include web-based content.