Conference Agenda

In 2022, BnF is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its electoral crawls. On this occasion, we would like to trace the history of 20 years of electoral crawls, which cover 20 elections of all types (presidential, parliamentary, local, departmental, European), and represent more than 30 Tio of data. The 2002 presidential election crawl was the first in-house crawl conducted by the BnF, a founding moment for experimenting a legal, technical and library policy framework. We, as an heritage institution, are accountable for the first electoral collections, which are emblematic and representative of our workflows on several aspects: harvest, selection, and outreach.

First, on the technical point of view, electoral crawls were an opportunity to set up crawling tools and to develop adaptative techniques to face the evolution of Web and meet the challenge to archive it. We have experimented and made improvements in our archiving processes for each new election and a specific look into the communication means (eg. forums, Twitter accounts, Youtube channels and more recently Instagram accounts, TikTok contents).

Secondly, electoral crawls have led the BnF to set up and organise a network of contributors and the means of selection. In 2002, contributions were from BnF librarians. In 2004, partners libraries in different regions and overseas territories contributed to select content for the regional elections. In 2012, we initiated the development of a collaborative curation tool. Throughout the years, we have also built a document typology that has remained stable to guarantee the coherence of the collections.

Thirdly, electoral crawls led us to set up ways to promote web archives to the public and the research community. To promote the use of a collection with such historical consistency, of high interest for the study of political life, we designed guided tours (thematic and edited selections of archived pages made by librarians). The BnF also engaged in organizing scientific events, and in several collaborative outreach initiatives.

The core mission of Qatar National Library is to “spread knowledge, nurture imagination, cultivate creativity, and preserve the nation’s heritage for the future.” To fulfil this mission, the Library commits to collecting, preserving and providing access to both local and global knowledge, including heritage-related content relevant to Qatar and the region. Web resources of cultural importance could assist future generations in the interpretation of events that may not be extant anywhere else. Archiving such websites is an important initiative within the wider mission of the Library to support Qatar on its journey towards a knowledge-based economy.

The 2022 FIFA World Cup will be the first World Cup ever to be held in the Arab world, and hence is considered a landmark event in Qatar’s history. Qatar’s journey towards hosting the 2022 World Cup has been covered by all types of local and international websites and news portals, and the coverage is expected to increase significantly in the weeks leading to, during and post-World Cup. The information published by these websites will truly reflect the journey towards, and experience of, the event from a variety of perspectives, including the fans, the organizers, the players, and members of the public. Capturing and preserving such information for the long-term enables future generations to also share the experience and appreciate the astounding effort required to host a massive, culturally important global event in Qatar.

In this talk, we describe the Library’s approach to capturing and preserving websites related to the World Cup 2022, to guarantee access to the content for the future generations. We also highlight the challenges associated with developing archived websites as collections for researchers in the context of the Qatari copyright law.

This presentation will celebrate the launch of the special collection ‘Museums on the Web’ at the KB, National Library of the Netherlands. This evolving collection unlocks an essential and the largest sub-collection within the KB Web archive. It contains more than 800 museum websites and offers the potential to research histories of museums on the Web within the Netherlands.

It requires special tools to access Web archives and therefore this presentation will demonstrate a variety of entry points. It features a selection of curated archived websites that can be viewed page-by-page. It will also be the first KB special collection that is accessible through a SOLR Wayback search engine, which enables the request of derived datasets and explore the collection through a series of dashboards. This offers the opportunity to study histories of museums on the Web in The Netherlands, combining methods from history and data science and drawing on a computational analysis of Web archive data.

The presentation will conclude with highlighting some significant case studies to showcase the diversity of museum websites and the research potential to uncover a Dutch history of museums on the Web. The advent of online technologies has changed the way museums manage collections and access them, shape exhibitions, and build communities. By engaging with the past, we can enhance our understanding of how museums are functioning today and offer new perspectives for future developments.

This paper coincides with the release of a Double Special Issue “Museums on the Web: Exploring the past for the future” in the journal Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Routledge/Taylor & Francis).

This presentation will overview the expansion and later retrenchment of UAlbany’s web archives program due to a lack of permanently funded staff. UAlbany began its web archives program in 2013 in response to state records laws requiring it to preserve university records on the web. The department that housed the program had strong existing collecting programs in New York State politics and capital punishment. Since much of current politics and activism now happens online, it was natural and necessary to expand the web archives program to ensure we were effectively documenting these important spaces for the long-term future. However, we will show how the increasing complexity of the web and collecting techniques means that the scoping needs for ongoing collecting seem to require significantly more testing and labor over time. Thus, despite the need to expand the web archives program to meet our department’s mission, we will describe the painful process of reducing our web archives collecting scope. With the NDSA Web Archiving in the United States surveys reporting 71-83% of respondents devoting 0.5 or less FTE to web archiving, maintenance inflation like this is catastrophic to many web archives programs. Most alarmingly, we will overview how the web archives labor situation at American universities is likely to get worse. The UAlbany Libraries, which houses the web archives program, has permanently lost over 30% of FTE since 2020 and almost 50% of FTE since 2000. Peer assessment studies, ARL staffing surveys, and the University of California, Berkley’s recent announcement of library closures shows that UAlbany’s example is more typical than exceptional. Finally, we will show how these cuts are not the result of a misunderstanding or a lack of value for web archives or libraries by university administrators, but because our web archives program conflicts with UAlbany’s overall organizational mission and the business model of American higher education.