Crowdsourcing Descriptive Metadata for Web Archives: The CA.gov Archive
Kathryn StineAuditorium
Kathryn Stine, California Digital Library
Kris Kasianovitz, Stanford University
Julie Lefevre, University of California, Berkeley
Lucia Orlando, University of California, Santa Cruz
Librarians at the University of California, Stanford University, and the California State Archives and State Library are working to ensure that valuable evidence of California’s state government history are collected and preserved in the Archive of California government documents (CA.gov Archive). California state government publications have nearly ceased being distributed in print; instead, they are now almost exclusively born-digital and available only on agency websites requiring that this content be captured in a systematic way that ensures their longevity and accessibility. Building the CA.gov Archive entails a great deal of coordinated work from seed selection, running crawls, performing QA activities, as well as creating metadata for the collection.
Recognizing the need for enhanced seed-level metadata improve discovery of and access to this significant collection of state government information, the CA.gov project team established a crowdsourcing project to engage other library and archives professionals in working together to describe the archived sites. In December 2017, we leveraged the power of 120 librarians and library staff volunteers from around the state (and beyond!) in a weeklong Metadata Sprint to enhance description of archived websites in the CA.gov collection. This is a good example of what the library community can accomplish by working together and provides a roadmap for others wishing to initiate a similar crowdsourcing project. We look forward to sharing our successes as well as what we’ve learned from the challenges we encountered. This poster and lighting talk will cover the project team’s planning process, sprint organization method (including outreach approaches and the development and deployment of training materials), as well as how we incorporated emerging best practices for web archives metadata and approached getting enhanced metadata into Archive-It and other discovery environments. For more on the CA.gov Archive Metadata Sprint, visit the project website: http://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/ca-gov-sprint