The Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL) and the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) have joined forces in a multi-consortial offering of Archive-It, the web archiving service of the Internet Archive. Working together, COPPUL and OCUL are considering ways that they can significantly expand web archiving in Canada.

A coordinated subscription to Archive-It builds on the efforts of Canadian universities that have developed web archiving programs over the years, and the past work of Archive-It with both COPPUL and OCUL members.  With 12 COPPUL members and 12 OCUL members (more than half the total membership) now subscribing to Archive-It, there is an opportunity to build a foundation for further collaboration supporting research services and other digital library initiatives. In addition, participation by so many libraries helps lower the barrier of entry for additional member institutions to join in web archiving efforts across Canada.

“OCUL is very pleased to be able to offer Archive-It to our members,” said Ken Hernden, University Librarian at Algoma University and OCUL Chair. “Preservation of information and research is an important aspect of what libraries do to benefit scholars and communities. Preserving information for the future was challenging in a paper-and-print environment. It has become even more so in the digital information environment. We hope that enabling access to this tool will help build capacity for web archiving across Ontario, and beyond.”

“Tools like Archive-It enable libraries and archives of all sizes to build news kinds of collections to support their communities in an environment where more and more of our cultural memory has moved online. We’re absolutely thrilled to be working with our OCUL colleagues in this critically important area,” said Corey Davis, COPPUL Digital Preservation Network Coordinator.

“Archive-It is excited to ramp up its support for web archiving in Canada. The joint subscription is a strategic and cost-effective way to expand web archiving among Canadian universities and to encourage participation from smaller universities who may not have felt they had the institutional resources to develop a web archiving program without the support of the consortiums.” said Lori Donovan, Senior Program Manager for Archive-It.

OCUL is a consortium of Ontario’s 21 university libraries. OCUL provides a range of services to its members, including collection purchasing and a shared digital information infrastructure, in order to support to support high quality education and research in Ontario’s universities. In 2017, OCUL commemorates its 50th anniversary.

Working together, COPPUL members leverage their collective expertise, resources, and influence, increasing capacity and infrastructure, to enhance learning, teaching, student experiences and research at our institutions. The consortium comprises 22 university libraries located in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia, as well as 15 affiliate members across Canada. First deployed in 2006, Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of web-published digital content.

Additionally, the recently created Canadian Web Archiving Coalition (CWAC) will help build a community of practice for Canadian organizations engaging in web archiving and create a network for collaboration, support, and knowledge sharing. Under the auspices of Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and in collaboration with Library and Archives Canada (LAC), the CWAC plans to hold an inaugural meeting in conjunction with the Internet Preservation Coalition General Assembly this September at LAC’s Preservation Centre in Gatineau, QC.  For more information about the CWAC, including how to join, please contact corey@coppul.ca.

For more information on the consortial subscription, contact carol@coppul.ca or jacqueline.cato@ocul.on.ca or lori@archive.org.

by Sylvie Rollason-Cass, Web Archivist, Archive-It

This year marked the 9th season of the K-12 web archiving program. Students from 11 schools around the country worked together to think critically about information on the web and to select websites to archive for the future. Their collections are centered around topics that reflect their interests, their day-to-day lives, current events, and topics they studied in class. Each school incorporates web archiving into its curriculum differently. This year 3 teachers generously shared their experiences participating in the K-12 Web Archiving program. Find out more about their year below, and be sure to check out all of the 2016-2017 Student Collections.

Web Archiving in the Civics Classroom at Williams Middle Magnet School 

Elizabeth Smith – Civics Teacher

My name is Elizabeth Smith and I teach Grade 7 Civics at Willaims Middle Magnet School in Tampa, Florida. I was so excited when I read about this project and could not wait to apply. I am technologically challenged but always look for ways to integrate technology into my classroom. Our civics curriculum is spiraled with analysis of primary and secondary sources and this project was a great way to enrich what we were already doing. We chose Florida as our focus as many of my students wanted to learn more about the state in which they live. Students chose to research websites of their own personal and academic interest. Several said this project would help them identify areas of research for their upcoming 8th grade community project. We are looking forward to being a part of the project again during the next archiving season!

Check out William’s Middle Magnet School’s 2016-2017 Collections >>> 

Using the Wayback Machine at the Rooftop School, Samuel discovers that YouTube was originally a dating website.

“Archive/Opera” – The Studio at Mayeda at Rooftop School

Andi Wong – Teaching Artist

At Rooftop Alternative PreK-8 School in San Francisco, 40 seventh and eighth graders worked with teaching artist Andi Wong to establish The Rooftop ARTchives. The “Archive/Opera” class at the school’s Mayeda Campus gave these students the opportunity to create both the “archives” (“public records” from the Greek ta arkheia,) and the opera (new “work”).

In this tumultuous political climate, the importance of community, civic responsibility and cultural memory became clear to our students. History will record how tribes of water-protectors gathered together at Standing Rock; millions of women marched around the world in pink knitted caps; scientists worked with archivists to save climate data and disappearing government websites; and the National Parks Service went rogue on Twitter. The act of archiving requires careful consideration of the past, present and future. As our students ventured beyond the walls of their classrooms to experience the stairways, slides and expansive vistas of Twin Peaks, their open conversations led to many questions. How can we know what is missing, if something has not yet been found? How many students have graduated from Rooftop? How far does the raven fly? Will San Francisco still experience fog in one hundred years? When today’s youth are sixty-four, will they still remember the lyrics to all of the songs from Hamilton?

The Archive/Opera class culminated with a community gathering — an Open House celebration of the Mayeda Campus’ 20th Anniversary, featuring artwork, musical performances, student speeches about the archiving experience. A tea serving ceremony honored principal Nancy Mayeda and the teachers who first opened the doors to the Mayeda Campus in 1997. The evening’s program closed with the presentation of a City proclamation and the dedication of the Rooftop ARTchives. When our students were asked to reflect on what they valued most about this year’s experience, they spoke of freedom, friendship and community pride in accomplishing something important together. Many thanks to the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and Archive-It’s K12 Web Archiving Program for helping Rooftop’s students to capture history in the making. The act of archiving gave our students a very real sense of their collective power and responsibility as the keepers of their own stories and memories.

Check out Rooftop School’s 2016-2017 Collections >>>

Reflections on the 2016-17 K12 Web Archiving Project at Mount Dora High School

Patricia Carlton, PhD – Media Specialist

Challenging adult authority may be the bailiwick of teenagers, yet when questioning the authority of the Internet, teens are not as skilled or tenacious. Web archiving presents a fun and empowering way for my high school students to critically examine the authorship and credibility of the Internet, as well as identify what is historically and culturally significant. When this year’s web-archiving students began selecting and creating collections for the archive, I suggested they peer more closely under the hood of each site and object. What did they discover from their crawls that wasn’t immediately apparent from their first “reading” of the website? The following quotes excerpted from a sampling of the students’ final review and evaluation of the project reveal the type of discoveries made regarding their collections and the Internet in general.

The web is an extremely important factor in preserving things in order to view them in later years. The web, in my opinion is also much easier and more accessible to a wider range of people. While on the web, you have to be extremely careful on what you consider a reliable source. – Felicia

I have learned that the web is very contradictory and is filled with differing opinions, facts, and beliefs, and you normally can find an answer you like if you search long enough, despite general public beliefs. – Kacee

Most students assumed greater responsibility for controlling their crawls than my previous web-archivers, evidenced by their attention to their crawl scopes and carefully crafted descriptions at both collection and seed level metadata. The 2016-17 cohort “authored” their respective collections and even added corresponding MLA citations! They believed not only in the significance of their collections (conspiracy theories, political memes, and chick flicks to mention a few), but they also believed they were contributing new knowledge – real, meaningful content to the Internet that someone, someday might discover. And, their teen voices would be the authority behind their interpretation and curation!

Check out Mount Dora’s 2016-2017 Collections >>>

In our December post, “Preserving U.S. Government Websites and Data as the Obama Term Ends,” we described our participation in the End of Term Web Archive project to preserve federal government websites and data at times of administration changes. We wanted to give a quick update on the project — we have archived a heck of a lot of data!

Between Fall 2016 and Spring 2017, the Internet Archive archived over 200 terabytes of government websites and data. This includes over 100TB of public websites and over 100TB of public data from federal FTP file servers totaling, together, over 350 million URLs/files. This includes over 70 million html pages, over 40 million PDFs and, towards the other end of the spectrum and for semantic web aficionados, 8 files of the text/turtle mime type. Other End of Term partners have also been vigorously preserving websites and data from the .gov/.mil web domains.

Every web page we have archived is accessible through the Wayback Machine and we are working to add the 2016 harvest to the main End of Term portal soon. While we continue to analyze this collection, we posted some preliminary statistics using the new Wayback Machine’s summary interface for this specific collection, which can be found on the End of Term (EOT 2016) summary stats page; those and additional stats are served via a public EOT 2016 stats API and the full collection is also available.

Through the EOT project’s public nomination form and through our collaboration with the DataRefuge, Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI), and other efforts, over 100,000 webpages or government datasets were nominated by citizens and preservationists for archiving. The EOT and community efforts have also garnered notable press (see our End of Term 2016 Press collection). We are working with partners to provide access to the full dataset for use in data mining and computational analysis and hosted a hackathon earlier this year to support use of the Obama White House Social Media datasets.

While the specific End of Term collection has closed, we continue our large-scale, dedicated efforts to preserve the government web. Working with the University of North Texas, we launched the Government Web & Data Archive nomination form so the public can continue to nominate public government websites and data to be archived.

Lastly, archiving government data remains a critical activity of the preservation community. You can help our role in these efforts by continuing to nominate websites, promoting the EOT project via press and outreach (contact the EOT project team for any inquiries), and by donating to the Internet Archive to support our ongoing mission to provide “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”