Research Working Group

Scope

The Research Working Group (RWG) seeks to promote the use of web archives and IIPC collaborative collections among researchers, share information about web archiving research projects at IIPC member organisations, including workflows and lessons learnt, and facilitate ways for dissemination and discussion of use cases. The group will collaborate with relevant research communities to help make both the IIPC collaborative and member collections available to researchers. RWG will include not only IIPC members but it will be open to all researchers who have used or are interested in using web archives.

Fit within the IIPC

The Research Working Group will work closely with the Content Development Working Group (CDG) on use of the IIPC collaborative collections and Training Working Group (TWG) on tutorials. The group will report to the Partnerships and Outreach Portfolio and, seek the Portfolio’s advice on:

  1. engaging with the research community and supporting researchers’ involvement in IIPC activities
  2. defining conditions for IIPC contributions to relevant conferences and research communities and
  3. raising awareness of the IIPC and Web Archiving through the participation in events of relevant communities.

RWG builds on the earlier efforts of Researcher Requirements Working Group, Access Working Group and IIPC members’ work on the use of web archives for research.

Key focus areas & deliverables

  • sharing information about research uses of web archives within the IIPC
  • promoting examples of researcher use cases on the IIPC website
  • gathering and sharing information about research related activities among the IIPC members
  • FAQ on legal issues and Tip Sheets on researcher requirements, workflows
  • sharing workflows (creating data sets, working with researchers)

Outreach activities

  • regular webinars (Research Speaker Series)
  • workshops at researcher focused events
  • continue collaboration with RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials), DARIAH (Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities), DHN (Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries), the Archives Unleashed Project and the Library Labs network

Projects

  • creating an indexed repository of presentations, white papers, and reports, ideally in an already existing repository hosted by an IIPC member
  • working with CDG & Partnerships & Outreach Portfolio to help CDG with guidelines on using IIPC collaborative collections and sample collections

Communication

The Research Working Group communicates via mailing list rwg[at]iipc.simplelists.com and IIPC Slack channel. To join the mailing list send an email to communications[at]iipc.simplelists.com