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Category: access

Google Newspaper Archives

I was intrigued by the news that Google had launched a News Archive search interface. For my first search, I searched on “Banjo Dancing” (a one man show that spent most of the 1980s in Arena Stage‘s Old Vat Room). It was tantalizing to see articles from “way back when” appear. The ‘timeline’ format was very useful way to quickly move through the articles and help focus your search.

Many newspapers that provide online access to their archives charge a per article fee for viewing the full article. You are not charged when you click on the link – but you do get a chance to view some sort of short abstract before paying. The advanced search permits you to limit your results based on their cost – so you can search only for those articles which are free or cost below a specific amount. By modifying my original search to only include free articles I found three, one from 1979, one from 2002 and one which did not yield anything.

So what does this mean for archives? In their FAQ, Google states “If you have a historical archive that you think would be a good fit in News archive search, we would love to hear from you.”. Take a moment and think about that – archives with digitized news content could raise their hand and ask to be included. Google has suddenly put the tools for increasing access in the hands of everyone. The university that has digitized it’s newspapers can suddenly be put on the same level with the New York Times and the Washington Post. There currently does not seem to be a fixed list showing “these are the news sources included in the Google news archive” – but I hope they add one.

In their usual fashion, Google has increased the chance of the serendipitous discovery of information – but because everything in the news archive will come from a vetted source, the quality and reliability of the information found should be far and above your standard web search.

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SAA 2006: Research Library Group Roundtable – Internet Archiving

Late in the afternoon on Thursday August 3rd I attended the Research Library Group Roundtable at SAA 2006. It was an opportunity for RLG to share information with the archival community about their latest products and services. This session included presentations on the Internet Archive , Archive-It and the Web Archives Workbench.

After some brief business related to the SAA 2007 program committee and the rapid election of Brian Stevens from NYU Archives as the new chair of the group, Anne Van Camp spoke about the period of transition as RLG merges with OCLC. In the interest of the blending of cultures – she told a bar joke (as all OCLC meetings apparently begin). She explained that RLG products and services will be integrated into the OCLC product line. RLG programs will continue as RLG becomes the research arm for the joined interest areas of libraries, archives and museums. This has not existed before and they believe it will be a great chance to explore things in ways that RLG hasn’t had the opportunity to do in the past.

The initiatives on their agenda:

  • archival gateways: convened 2 meetings recently. The first to see if there is a way to be interactive with international archive databases and the second to bring regional archives together to see how they can work together.
  • web archiving: started looking at it from a service point of view, but also some community issues that have to be worked out around web archiving. Looking at big problems that will need community involvement – issues like metadata and selection.
  • standards: continuing to support EAD, pursuing rigorous agenda regarding EAC
  • OCLC has a whole group of people who works on registries (where you put information about organizations). RLG has talked about building a registry on top of Archive Grid of US archives.

In her introduction, Merrilee (frequent poster on hangingtogether.org ) highlighted that there are lots of questions about the intellectual side of web archiving (vs the technical challenges) such as:

  • what to archive?
  • what metadata data and description is appropriate for it?
  • what would end users of web archives need? How would they use a web archive?
  • what about collaborative collection development? It is expensive to archive the web – how does an institution say “I am archiving this corner of the web – this deep – this often”. This information should be publicly available for others doing research and others archiving the web.

She pointed out that RLG is happy about their work with Internet Archive – they are doing work to make the technical side easier but they understand that there is a lot for the archival community to sort out.

Next up was Kristine Hanna of the Internet Archive giving her presentation ‘Archiving and Preserving the Web’. The Internet Archive has been working with RLG this year and they need information from the users in the RLG community. They are looking into how they are going to work with OCLC and have applied for an NDIIP grant.

The Internet Archive (IA), founded by Brewster Kahle in 1996, is built on open source principles and dedicated to Open Source software.

What do they collect in the archive? Over 2 billion pages a month in 21 languages. It is free and the largest archive on the web including 55 billion pages from 55 million sites and supporting 60,000 unique users per day.

Why try to collect it all? They don’t feel comfortable making the choices about appraisal. And at risk websites and collections are disappearing all the time. The average lifespan of a web page is 100 days. They did a case study of crawling websites associated with the Nigerian election – 6 months after the election 70% of the crawled sites were gone, but they live on in the archive.

How do they collect? They use these components and tools:

How do they preserve it? They keep multiple copies at different digital repositories (CA, Alexandria (Egypt), France, Amsterdam) using over 1300 server machines.

IA also does targeted archiving for partners. Institutions that want to create specific online collections or curated domain crawls can work with IA. These archives start at 100+ million documents and are based on crawls run by IA crawl engineers. The Library of Congress has arranged for an assortment of targeted archives including archives of US National Elections 2000, September 11 and the War in Iraq (not accessible yet – marked March 2003 – Ongoing). Australia arranged for archiving of the entire .au domain. Also see Purpose, Pragmatism and Perspective – Preserving Australian Web Resources at the National Library of Australia by Paul Koerbin of the National Library of Australia and published in February of 2006.

What’s Next for Internet Archive?

  • collaboration and partnerships
  • OCA – open content alliance
  • Multiple copies around the world

Next, Dan Avery of IA gave a 9 minute version of his 35 minute presentation on Archive-It. Archive-It is a web based annual subscription service provided by IA to permit the capture of up to 10 million pages. Kristine gave some examples of those using Archive-It during her presentation:

  • Indiana University – web sites
  • North Carolina State Archives – Government Agencies, Occupational Licensing Boards and commissions.
  • Library of Virginia – Jamestown 2007 commemoration and Governor Mark Warner’s last year in office. When Mark Warner was listed by the New York Times as a possible presidential candidate, this archive got lots of hits. (This brings up interesting questions of watching content that is being purposefully preserved to get an idea of what some expect for the future. Don’t be surprised by a post on this idea all by itself later. Need to think about it some more!)

He highlighted the different elements and techniques used in Archive-It: crawling, web user interface, storage, playback, text indexing and integration.

  • Crawling/Browsing:
      • open source java
      • Archival-quality (they preserve exactly what they get back from the server)
      • Highly configurable
      • lets you surf the web as it was
      • in Archive-It – each customer has their own wayback machine
      • not open source yet.. that is a work in progress
  • The user interface is a web application:
    • collects all the info they need to do the crawling the customer requests
    • schedule (monthly, daily, weekly, quarterly… etc)
    • seed URLS (the starting point for archive web crawls)
    • crawl parameters
    • extension of Nutch which is built on Lucene
    • full text search plus link analysis
    • can search by date instead of relevance – useful for individual archives

While there are public collections in Archive-It, logging in gives you access to personal sites: shows the total documents archived (and more), lets you check your list of active collections and set up a new collection (includes unique collection identifier). He showed some screen shots of the interface and examples (this was the first time there wasn’t a network available for his presentation – he was amused that his paranoia that forced him to always bring screen captures finally paid off!).

It was interesting seeing this presentation back to back with the general Internet Archive overview. There are lots of overlap in tools and approaches between them – but Archive-It definitely has it’s own unique requirements. It puts the tools for managing larges scale web crawling in the hands of archivists (or more likely information managers of some sort) – rather than the technical staff of IA.

The final presentation of the roundtable was by Judy Cobb – a Product Manager fromOCLC. She gave an overview of the Web Archives Workbench. (I hunted for a good link to this – but the best I came up with was acknowledgments document and the login page .)The inspiration for the creation of Workbench was the challenge of collecting from web. The Internet is a big place. It is hard to define the scope of what to archive.

Workbench is a discovery tool that will permit its users to investigate what domains should be included when crawling a website for archiving. It will ask you which domains should be included. For example, you can tell it not to crawl Adobe.com just because there is a link to it to let people download acrobat.

Workbench will let you set metadata data for your collection based on the domains you said were in scope. It will then let you appraise and rank the entities/domains being harvested, leaving you with a list of organizations or entities in scope and ranked by importance. Next it will translate a site map of what is going to be crawled, define parts of the map as series and put the harvested content and related metadata into a repository. Other configuration options permit setting how frequently you harvest various series, choosing to only get new content and requesting notification if the sitemap changes.

Workbench is currently in beta and is still under development. The 3rd phase will add the support for Richard Pierce-Moses’s Arizona Model for Web Preservation and Access. The focus of the Arizona Model is curation, not technology. It strives to find a solution somewhere between manual harvesting and bulk harvesting that is based on standard archival theories. Workbench will be open source and funded by LOC.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the roundtable – but I was VERY glad that I attended. The group was very enthusiastic – cramming in everything they could manage to share with those in the room. The Internet Archive, Archive-It and the Web Archives Workbench represent the front of the pack of software tools intended to support archiving the web. It was easy to see that if the Workbench is integrated in with Archive-It, that it should permit archivists to start paying more attention to the identification of what should be archived rather than figuring out how to do the actual archiving.

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SAA2006 Session 305: Extended Archival Description Part III – EAD and TEI

Amanda Wilson of the Ohio State University Libraries delivered the final presentation of SAA2006 session 305 (Extended Archival Description: Context and Specificity for Digital Objects), Dynamic Duo: Enhancing Access through Dual Description with EAD and TEI. She described a proof of concept project designed to explore if EAD and TEI can be used to support a humanities professor who has students learning how to digitize and add markup.

She provided the following list of example sites:

The professor’s goals for this year’s project are to create a home page that includes a collection description, document the scholarly process and follow markup rules. Amanda got a big cheer for saying she was “not sure if you can keep scholarly process in EAD – but hey, I’ll try anything”.

For each item being digitized the professor wanted to include all of the following:

  • Markup
  • Reading View
  • Diplomatic View – summary of all marks
  • XML source (aka TEI file – AACR2 bibliographic record could be created from this data)

How can she replicate the process the class was going through to support these goals? First, she picked the software created by DLXS that was already being used on site.

During the course of her research, she had to come up with methods to do all of the following:

  • Retrieve metadata and images
  • Convert image to TIFF
  • Figure out how to connect from EAD to the TEI information
  • Load TEI and EAD files and images into DLXS

The solution would need to support the community and the work they have already done. Amanda’s vision was to permit addition of item level description to the EAD with no additional editing AND load the TEI with little or no modification. It was a challenge to massage the TEI to validate against the Document Type Definition (DTD). She also wanted to link back to the original site created by the professor’s students in order to retain extra information that had no place in the EAD.

At about this point I was wishing (for the umpteenth time at SAA) that there was internet in order for online demos.

There were definitely challenges. For example, DLXS is aimed at eBooks, while TEI has additional fields such as those required to support properties related to “hand” (as in who wrote the scanned content). This makes it hard to change the TEI format to fit into DLXS. Using TEI in DLXS does permit searching for individual items, but they may need to do additional massaging to get the data to line up with the fields expected.

The conclusion of the presentation was that it can be done. It is possible to integrate the professor’s transcriptions using EAD and TEI within DLXS, but there will need to be more discussion with the faculty member about their requirements. The ultimate aim is for a federated search that is integrated into the institution’s central search. Those who are working on similar projects may be interested in moving to using a standard, but only up to the point at which they start loosing the data that is important to them for their research focus.

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SAA 2006 Poster: Communicating Context in Online Collections

I promised a number of people I spoke with at the SAA 2006 conference that I would post information from my poster. I have finally added it on a page here on the blog.

For those of you who didn’t make the conference (or didn’t make it to my mini talk in front of my poster on Friday morning), my poster showed the results of my research into how the web interfaces to various digitized archival collections handled the issues of original order and communication of context. I was very interested to see to what degree websites for digitized collections were doing a good job helping the user understand the relationships between the records as well as the context of the records.

Most people asked me which was my ‘favorite’ – and my answer was always that I liked something about each of the sites I showed on my poster. A perfect site would have the collection overview that the Library of Congress American Memory – Browse Collections page shows, the convenient search result resorting option shown on the Greene & Greene Virtual Archives search result page, the item details display option provided on the Irene Kaufman Settlement Photograph Collection ‘images with full record’ search results page, the clear communication of hierarchy shown in the Yoshiko Uchida example of the GenView MOA2 document viewer and a rich use of audio, images and in-place historical context as is done on the Gilder Lehrman Wartime Love Letters site. The big answer I found from all of this was that planning ahead was key. If you keep metadata related to the order of the records being digitized, it gives you the opportunity to do good things with that information when building your interface.

On the ‘Poster page’ have included a list of links to the websites I used as my examples, my key points and a thumbnail of the poster with a link to download a BIG version (you will need to scroll around a good bit – but you should be able to read it in the large version).

If you have questions – just let me know. I can always be reached via email at jeanne AT spellboundblog.com.

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Session 305: Extended Archival Description Part I – Archives of American Art

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Session 305 included perspectives from three digital collections which are trying to use EAD and meta data to solve real world problems of navigation and access. This post addresses the presentation by the first speaker, Barbara Aikens from the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.

The Archives of American Art (AAA) has over 4,500 collections focusing on the history of American art. They received a 3.6 million dollar grant from the Terra Foundation to fund their 5 year project. They had already been using EAD for their standard in online finding aids since 2004. They also had already looked into digitizing their microfilmed holdings and they believe that the history of microfilming at AAA made the transition to scanning entire collections at the item level easier than it might otherwise have been. So far they have digitized 11 full collections (45 linear feet).

Their organization of the digitized files was based on collection code, box and folder. Basing their template on the EAD Cookbook, AAA used Note Tab Pro to create their XML EAD finding aid. I wonder how they might be able to take advantage of the open source software tools being developed such as Archon and the Archivists’ Toolkit (if you are interested in these packages, keep your eye open for my future post looking at them each in detail). There was some mention of re-purposing DCDs, but I was not clear about what they were describing.

The resulting online finding aid lets you read all the information you would expect to find in a finding aid (see an example), as well as permitting you to drill down into each series or container to view a list of folders. Finally the folder view provides thumbnails on the left and a big image on the right. Note that this item level folder view includes very basic folder meta data and a link back to that folder’s corresponding series page. There is no meta data for any of the images of individual items. This approach for organizing and viewing digitized collections is workable for large collections. The context is well communicated and the user’s experience is very like that of going through a collection while physically visiting an archive. First you use the finding aid to location collections of interest. Next you examine the Series and or Container descriptions to location the types of information for which you are looking. Finally, you can drill down to folders with enticing names to see if you can find what you need.

As an experiment, I tested the ‘Search within Collections/Finding Aids’ option by searching for “Downtown Gallery” and for gallery artist files to see if I was given a link to the new Downtown Gallery Records finding aid. My search for “Downtown Gallery” instead directed me to what appears to be a MARC record in the Smithsonian Archives, Manuscripts and Photographs catalog. Two versions of the finding aid are linked to from this record – with no indication as to how they are different (it turned out one was an old version – the other the new one which includes links to the digitized content). A bit more experimentation showed me that the new online collection finding aids are not integrated into the search. I will have to remember to try this sort of searching in a few months to see what the search experience is like.

What I was hoping for (in a perfect world) would be highlighting of the search terms and deep linking from the search results directly to the series and folder description pages. I wonder what side effects there will be for the accuracy of search results given that the series/folder detail description page does not include all the other text from the main finding aid. (ie New Finding Aid vs New Finding Aid Series Level Page). Oddly enough – the old version of the finding aid for this same collection includes the folder level descriptions on the SAME page (with HTML anchors permitting linking from the side bar Table of Contents to the correct location on the page). So a search for terms that appear in the historical background along with the name of an artist only listed at the folder level WOULD return results (in standard text searching) for the old finding aid but not for the new one. Once the new finding aids are integrated into the search results – it would be very helpful to have an option to only return finding aids that include digitized collections.

While exploring the folder level view, I assumed that the order of the images in the folders is the original order in the analog folder. If so, then that is a fabulous and elegant way of communicating the original order of the records to the user of the digital interface. If NOT – then it is quite misleading because a user could easily assume, as I did, that the order in which they are displayed in the folder view is the original order.

Overall, this is exciting work – and shows how well the EAD can function as a framework for the item level digitization of documents. It also points to some interesting questions about how to handle search within this type of framework.

UPDATE: See the comment below for the clarification that the new finding aids based on the work described in this presentation are NOT online yet – but should be at the end of the month (posted: 08/09/2006). 

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SAA 2006 Session 103: “X” Marks the Spot: Archiving GIS Databases – Part II

Richard Marciano of the SALT interdisciplinary lab (Sustainable Archives & Library Technologies) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center delivered a presentation titled “Research Issues Related to Preservation of Geospatial Electronic Records” – the 2nd topic in the ‘X’ Marks the Spot session.

He focuses on research Issues related to preservation of geospatial electronic records. While not an archivist, he is a member of SAA. As a person coming to archival studies with a strong background in software development, I took great comfort in his discussion of their being a great future for IT and archivists to work together on topics such as this.

Richard gave us a great overview of the most recent work being done in this field, along with a snapshot of the latest up and coming projects on the horizon. If I had to pick one main point to empasize, it would be that IT can provide the infrastructure to automate much of what is now being done by hand – but there is a long way to go to achieve this dream and it will require extensive collaboriation between Archivists (with the experience of how things should be done) and the IT community (with the technical expertise to build the systems needed). His presentation was definitely more organized than my laundry list below – please do not take my notes below as an indication of the flow of his talk.

NHPRC Electronic Records/GIS projects:

  • CIESIN www.ciesin.columbia.edu/ger at Columbia University
  • Maine GeoArchives www.maine.gov/geoarch/index.htm Maine State Archvies (see Part III of the Session 103 posts for details on the Maine GeoArchives)
  • eLegacy (State California & SDSC) – California’s geospacial records archival appraisal, accessioning and preservation. Starting in 2006
  • InterPARES Van MAP (2005) –presentation of the City of Vancouver GIS Database

More IT related projects:

  • Archivists’ Workbench (2000) www.sdsc.edu/NHPRCS Methodologies for the long-term preservation of and access to software-dependent electronic records. Includes tools for GIS
  • ICAP (2003) www.sdsc.edu/ICAP change management
  • PAT (2004) www.sdsc.edu/PAT persistent archives testbed and the Michigan precinct voting records, spacial data ingestion

SDSC has a goal of infrastructure independence – they want to keep data and move it easily over time. Their current preferred approach uses Data Grids (see American Archivist Journal , volume 69 – Number 1: Building Preservation Environments with Data Grid Technology by Reagan W. Moore) which depend on the dual goals of data virtualization and trust virtualization. He recommended the SAA Electronic Records Section on Friday from 12 to 2 for good related presentations.

CIESIN www.ciesin.columbia.edu/ger at Columbia University
Common types of data loss:

  • loss of non-archived data
  • historical versions of data

North Carolina Geospatial Data Archiving Project (www.lib.ncsu.edu/ncgdap) Steve Morris – Instead of solving problems, it actually further complications. Complex databases can be difficult to manage over time due to complex data models, challenges of proprietary database models… has MANY levels of individual datasets or data layers.

e-Legacy – working from the California State Archives
July 2006 – July 2008
The staff is a mix of California State Archives staff and members of SDSC. They are using data grid technology to build a distributed community grid. Distributed storage permits addition of storage arbitrarily and in multiple locations.
Infrastructure is being deployed across multiple offices and the SDSC.

InterPARES VanMAP (University of British Columbia)
A big city centralized enterprise GIS system
Question of case study: What are the records? Where are the records? What do they look like – from the point of view of the city users?
What infrastructure would you need to do a historical query – to see what the city would look like in a specific date in the past? Current enterprise systems are meant to be a snapshot of the present with nothing in place to support storage of past records.

How did they approach this? They got representative data sets. Put all the historical data layers into a ‘dark archive’ repository. Built proof of concept.. put in date request – correct layers are brought back from the archive system and on the fly they are rendered to show the closest version of the historical map possible.

There is a list of 30 or so questions that is part of evaluating the system.

ICAP: preserving and using temporal and multi-versions of records
Keep track of versions of records. Being aware of a timeline of records and being able to ask significant historical questions of those records.

Took multiple time slices – and automatically create an XML database using the records from the time slices of data. XML database and spatial querying

PAT Testbed
Creating a joint consortium model for managing records across state boundaries. Distributed framework with local ‘Grid Block’ at each location. Local Storage Resources manage and populate their local resources.
Goal: how do we automate archival processes

Michigan Department of Community – preserving and accessing Michigan Historical voting records. Created a MySQL database with the records. Did automatic scrubbing and validation of records based on rules. Due to the use of GIS it permits viewing maps with data shown – red/blue voting statistics by county. Viewer permits looking at maps by election year.

In response to a question, he talked about a project to take 401 Certification permits (related to water) – aspect of the PAT project that looked at this.. digitized all the historical records within a watershed. Delivered it back to the state agency. Integrating all the government processes – to permit them to ask good questions about the permits and the related locations (upstream or downstream).

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SAA 2006 Session 103: “X” Marks the Spot: Archiving GIS Databases – Part I

‘X’ Marks the Spot was a fantastic first session for me at the SAA conference. I have had a facination with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) for a long time. I love the layers of information. I love the fact that you can represent information in a way that often makes you realize new things just from seeing it on a map.

Since my write-ups of each panelist is fairly long, I will put each in a separate post.

Helen Wong Smith, from the Kamehameha Schools, started off the panel discussing her work on the Land Legacy Database in her presentation titled “Wahi Kupuna: Digitized Cultural Resources Database with GIS Access”.

Kamehameha Schools (KS) was founded by the will of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop. With approximately 360,000 acres, KS is the largest private landowner in the state of Hawaii. With over $7 billion in assets the K-12 schools subsidize a significant portion of the cost to educate every student (parents pay only 10% of the cost).

KS generates income from residential, commercial and resort leases. In addition to generating income – a lot of the land has a strong cultural connection. Helen was charged with empowering the land management staff to apply 5 values every time there is any type of land transaction: Economic, Educational, Cultural, Environmental and Community. They realized that they had to know about the lands they own. For example, if they take a parcel back from a long lease and they are going to re-lease it, they need to know about the land. Does it have archaelogical sites? Special place to the Hawai’ian people?

Requirements for the GIS enabled system:

  • Find the information
  • Keep it all in one place
  • Ability to export and import from other standard-based databases (MARC, Dublin Core, Open Archives Initiative)
  • Some information is private – not to be shared with public
  • GIS info
  • Digitize all text and images
  • Identify by Tax map keys (TMK)
  • Identify by ‘traditional place name’
  • Identify by ‘common names’ – surfer invented names (her favorites examples are ‘suicides’ and ‘leftovers’)

The final system would enforce the following security:

  • Lowest – material from public repositories i.e the Hawaii State Archives
  • Medium – material for which we’ve acquired the usage rights for limited use
  • Highest – leases and archaeological reports

Currently the Land Legacy Database is only available within the firewall – but eventually the lowest level of security will be made public.
They already had a web GIS portal and needed this new system to hook up to the Web GIS as well and needed to collect and disseminate data, images, audio/visual clips and references in all formats. In addition, the land managers needed easy way to access information from the field, such as lease agreement or archaeological reports (native burials? Location & who they were).

Helen selected Greenstone – open source software (from New Zealand) for the following reasons:

  • open source
  • multilingual (deals with glottals and other issues with spelling in Hawiian language)
  • GNU General Public License
  • Software for building and distributing digital library collections
  • New way to organizing information
  • Publish it on the internet and CD-ROM
  • many ways of access including by Search, Titles and Genres
  • support for audio and video clips (Example – Felix E Grant Collection).

The project started with 60,000 TIF records (can be viewed as JPEGS) – pre-scanned and indexed by another person. Each of these ‘Claim documents’ includes a testimony and a register. It is crucial to reproduce the original primary resources to prevent confusion, such as can occur between place names and people names.

Helen showed an example from another Greenstone database of newspaper articles published in a new Hawaiian journal. It was displayed in 3 columns, one each for:

  • original hawaiian language newspaper as published
  • the text including the diacriticals
  • English translation

OCR would be a major challenge with these documents – so it isn’t being used.

Helen worked with programmers in New Zealand to do the customizations needed (such as GIS integration) after loosing the services of the IT department. She has been told that she made more progress working with the folks from New Zealand than she would have with IT!

The screen shots were fun – they showed examples of how the Land Legacy Database data uses GIS to display layers on maps of Hawaii including outlines of TMKs or areas with ‘traditional names’. One can access the Land Legacy Database by clicking on a location on the map and selecting Land Legacy Database to get to records.

The Land Legacy Database was envisioned as a tool to compile diverse resources regarding the Schools’ lands to support decision making i.e. as the location and destruction of cultural sites. Its evolution includes:

  • inclusion of internal and external records including reports conducted for and by the Schools in the past 121 years
  • a platform providing access to staff, faculty and students across the islands
  • sharing server space with the Education Division

Helen is only supposed to spend 20% of her time on this project! Her progress is amazing.

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Thoughts on Archiving Web Sites

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Shortly after my last post, a thread surfaced on the Archives Listserv asking the best way to crawl and record the top few layers of a website. This led to many posts suggesting all sorts of software geared toward this purpose. This post shares some of my thinking on the subject.

Adobe Acrobat can capture a website and convert it into a PDF. As pointed out in the thread above, that would loose the original source HTML – yet there are more issues than that alone. It would also loose any interaction other than links to other pages. It is not clear to me what would happen to a video or flash interface on a site being ‘captured’ by Acrobat. Quoting a lesson for Acrobat7 titled Working with the Web : “Acrobat can download HTML pages, JPEG, PNG, SWF, and GIF graphics (including the last frame of animated GIFs), text files, image maps and form fields. HTML pages can include tables, linkes, frames, background colors, text colors, and forms. Cascading Stylesheets are supported. HTML links are turned into Web links, and HTML forms are turned into PDF forms.”

I looked at a few website HTML capture programs such as Heritrix, Teleport Pro, HTTrack Web and the related ProxyTrack. I hope to take the time to compare each of these options and discover what it does when confronted with something more complicated than HTML, images or cascading style sheets. It also got me thinking about HTML and versions of browsers. It think it safe to say that most people who browse the internet with any regularity have had the experience of viewing a page that just didn’t look right. Not looking right might be anything from strange alignment or odd fonts all the way to a page that is completely illegible. If you are a bit of a geek (like me) you might have gotten clever and tried another browser to see if it looked any better. Sometimes it does – sometimes it doesn’t. Some sites make you install something special (flash or some other type of plugin or local program).

Where does this leave us when archiving websites? A website is much more than just it’s text. If the text were all we worried about I am sure you could crawl and record (or screen scrape) just the text and links and call it a day being fairly confident that text stored as a plain ASCII file (with some special notation for links) would continue to be readable even if browsers disappeared from the world. While keeping the words is useful, it also looses a lot of the intended meaning. Have you read full text journal articles online that don’t have the images? I have – and I hate it. I am a very visually oriented person. It doesn’t help me to know there WAS a diagram after the 3rd paragraph if I can’t actually see it. Keeping all the information on a webpage is clearly important. The full range of content (all the audio, video, images and text on a page) is important to viewing the information in its original context.

Archivists who work with non-print media records that require equipment for access are already in the practice of saving old machines hoping to ensure access to their film, video and audio records. I know there are recommendations for retaining older computers and software to ensure access to data ‘trapped’ in ‘dead’ programs (I will define a dead program here as one which is no longer sold, supported or upgraded – often one that is only guaranteed to run on a dead operating system). My fear is for the websites that ran beautifully on specific old browsers. Are we keeping copies of old browsers? Will the old browsers even run on newer operating systems? The internet and its content is constantly changing – even just keeping the HTML may not be enough. What about those plugins – what about the streaming video or audio. Do the crawlers pull and store that data as well?

One of the most interesting things about reading old newspapers can be the ads. What was being advertised at the time? How much was the sale price for laundry detergent in 1948? With the internet customizing itself to individuals or simply generating random ads how would that sort of snapshot of products and prices be captured? I wonder if there is a place for advertising statistics as archival records. What google ads were most popular on a specific day? Google already has interesting graphs to show the correspondence between specific keyword searches and news stories that google perceives as related to the event. The Internet Archive (IA) could be another interesting source for statistical analysis of advertising for those sites that permit crawling.

What about customization? Only I (or someone looking over my shoulder) can see my MyYahoo page. And it changes each time I view it. It is a conglomeration of the latest travel discounts, my favorite comics, what is on my favorite TV and cable channels tonight, the headlines of the newspapers/blogs I follow and a snapshot of my stock portfolio. Take even a corporate portal inside an intranet. Often a slightly less moving target – but still customizable to the individual. Is there a practical way to archive these customized pages – even if only for a specific user of interest? Would it be worthwhile to be archiving the personalized portal pages of an ‘important’ or ‘interesting’ person on a daily basis – such that their ‘view’ of the world via a customized portal could be examined by researchers later?

A wealth of information can be found on the website for the Joint Workshop on Future-proofing Institutional Websites from January 2006. The one thing most of these presentations agree upon is that ‘future-proofing’ is something that institutions should think about at the time of website design and creation. Standards for creating future-proof websites directs website creators to use and validate against open standards. Preservation Strategies for institutional website content shows insight into NARA‘s approach for archiving US government sites, the results of which can be viewed at http://www.webharvest.gov/. A summary of the issues they found can be read in the tidy 11 page web harvesting survey.

I definitely have more work ahead of me to read through all the information available from the International Internet Preservation Consortium and the National Library of Australia’s Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI). More posts on this topic as I have time to read through their rich resources.

All around, a lot to think about. Interesting challenges for researchers in the future. The choices archivists face today often will depend on the type of site they are archiving. Best practices are evolving both for ‘future-proofing’ sites and for harvesting sites for archiving. Unfortunately, not everyone building a website that may be worth archiving is particularly concerned with validating their sites against open standards. Institutions that KNOW that they want to archive their sites are definitely a step ahead. They can make choices in their design and development to ensure success in archiving at a later date. It is the wild west fringe of the internet that are likely to present the greatest challenge for archivists and researchers.

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Paper Calendars, Palm Pilots and Google Calendar

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In my intro archives class (LBSC 605 Archival Principles, Practices, and Programs), one of the first ideas that made a light bulb go on over my head related to the theory that archivists want to retain the original order of records. For example, if someone choose to put a series of 10 letters together in a file – then they should be kept that way. A researcher may be able to glean more information from these letters when he/she sees them grouped that way – organized as the person who originally used them organized them.

Our professor went on to explain that seeing what the person who used the records saw was crucial to understanding the original purpose and usage of those records. That took my mind quickly to the world of calendars. Years ago, a CEO of some important organization would have a calendar or datebook of some sort – likely managed by an assistant. Ink or pencil was used to write on paper. Perhaps fresh daily schedules would be typed.

Fast forward to now and the universe of the Palm Pilot and other such handy-dandy hand held and totally customizable devices. If you have one (or have seen those of a friend) you know that how I choose to look at my schedule may be radically different from the way you choose to see your schedule. Mine might have my to-do list shown on the bottom half of the screen. Yours might have little colored icons to show you when you have a conference call. The archivist asked to preserve a born digital calendar will have a lot of hard choices to make.

These days I actually use Google Calendar more often than my Palm. While it has more of a fixed layout (for the moment) – I have the option of including many external calendars (see examples at iCalShare). Right now I have listings of when new movies come out as well as the concert schedule for summer 2006 for the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts. In the old style paper calendar, a researcher would be able to see related events that the user of the calendar cared about because they would be written down right there. If someone wanted to include my Google calendar in an archive someday (or that of someone much more important!), I suspect they would be left with JUST the records I had added myself into my calendar. When I choose to display the Wolf Trap summer schedule, Google calendar asks me to wait while it loads – presumably from an externally published iCalendar or other public Google calendar source.

This has many implications for the archivist tasked with preserving the records in that Palm Pilot or Google calendar (or any of a laundry list of scheduling applications). This post can do nothing other than list interesting questions at this stage (both ‘this stage’ of my archival education as well as ‘this stage’ of consideration of born digital records in the archival field).

  • How important is it to preserve the appearance of the interface used by the digital calendar user?
  • Might printing or screen capturing a statistical sample (an entire month? an entire year?) help researchers in the future understand HOW the record creator in question interacted with their calendar – what sorts of information they were likely to use in making choices in their scheduling?
  • Could there be a place for preserving publicly shared calendars (like the ones you can choose to access on Google Calendar or Apple’s iCal) such that they would be available to researchers later? What organization would most likely be capable of taking this sort of task on?
  • Could emulators be used to permit easy access to centrally stored born digital calendars? At least one PalmOS Emulator already exists, created mainly for use by those developing software for hardware that runs the Palm operating system it mimics how the tested software would run in the real world. Should archivists be keeping copies of this sort of software as they look to the future of retaining the best access possible to these sorts of records?
  • How can the standard iCalendar format be leveraged by archivists working to preserve born digital calendars?
  • To what degree are the schedules of people whose records will be of interest to archivists someday moving out of private offices (and even out of personally owned computers and handheld devices) and into the centralized storage of web applications such as Google Calendar?

I know that this is just a tiny bite of the kinds of issues being grappled with by Archivists around the world as they begin to accept born digital records into archives. Each type of application (scheduling vs accounting vs business systems) will pose similar issues to those described above – along with special challenges unique to each type. Perhaps if each of the most common classes of applications (such as scheduling) are tackled one by one by a designated team we can save individual archivists the pain of reinventing the wheel. Is this already happening?

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