TUTORIAL: Using Cobweb to manage collaborative or complementary web archive collecting projects 16:30-17:30

Kathryn Stine, California Digital Library

With funding from the US Institute of Museum and Library Services, Cobweb, a joint project of the California Digital Library, UCLA, and Harvard University, is a platform for supporting thematic web archive collecting projects, with an emphasis on complementary, coordinated, and collaborative collecting activities. Cobweb is an open source, web-based community tool that is improved with community involvement and input. This tutorial therefore will provide participants with opportunities to explore and familiarize themselves with the Cobweb platform, establish sample collecting projects, and navigate the Cobweb registry of aggregated metadata about existing collections and crawled seeds held by archival programs across the world.

Cobweb supports three key functions of collaborative collection development: suggesting nominations, asserting claims, and reporting holdings. Curators establish thematic collecting projects in Cobweb and encourage nominators to suggest relevant seed web sites as candidates for archiving. For any given collecting project, archival programs can claim their intention to capture a subset of nominated seeds. Once they have successfully captured seeds included in a given collecting project, descriptions of these holdings will become part of the Cobweb holdings registry. Cobweb interacts with external data sources to populate this registry, which curators can then search and browse to inform their planning for future collecting activity and which researchers can use to explore descriptions of archived web resources useful to their research.

Participants can expect orientations to setting up Cobweb accounts; establishing and updating collecting projects; determining and setting approaches for soliciting nominations to their projects; assigning descriptive metadata to projects, nominations, and holdings; understanding metadata flows into and out of Cobweb; and advanced searching within and across the Cobweb registry. Some time will also be spent on exploring how Cobweb supports multi-participant communication within and across the activities involved in establishing and managing collecting projects. The tutorial facilitator will provide overviews of Cobweb documentation, how Cobweb relates to or interacts with complementary web archiving systems and tools, and the roadmap for continued maintenance and enhancement of the Cobweb platform.