Archiving and Preserving the Web

Libraries and archives have long collected information to serve scholars in understanding history, culture, and society. Today, Web pages have replaced newsletters; blogs have supplanted diaries; and many government forms and documents are more readily accessible on the Web than in paper form. As part of an effort to appropriately document and capture today's information for tomorrow's use, institutions must adopt a Web archiving strategy. Fortunately, Archive-It takes much of the burden out of the task. Archive-It is a Web application uniquely designed for the needs of university and government institutions interested in preserving Web content. The application allows organizations with limited infrastructure and technical staff to collect, catalog, search, and manage archived Web content through a Web interface. Built on open source components by the Internet Archive and the International Internet Preservation Consortium, Archive-It creates and stores the ARC files that are the standard format for Web archiving. In this presentation, two representatives from the Internet Archive discuss the Archive-It project.