11:00 – 11:20
Tolulope Balogun & Trywell Kalusopa: Developing a framework for web archiving of indigenous knowledge systems in selected academic institutional repositories in Africa
University of Zululand
Indigenous Knowledge is a very important knowledge and developmental tool in Africa. There is a growing trend in the digitisation of heritage materials in Africa but while there is consensus on the importance of digitising Indigenous Knowledge in Africa, the issues of ensuring long-term digital material preservation so that digital information is permanently secured and protected. The paper therefore examines the digital preservation of Indigenous Knowledge in selected academic institutional repositories in South Africa with a view to developing a framework for Web Archiving that will ensure their authenticity, reliability and trustworthiness.
Anchored on the interpretivist research paradigm, the Multiple Case Study Method was used to collect qualitative data for the paper. Data was collected from 5 academic institutions in South Africa. The purposive sampling technique was used to select the participants in the academic institutions. The data for the study was collected through comprehensive face-to-face interviews, observation and content analysis. The Web Archiving Life Cycle Model and the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model were also used to generate qualitative data for the paper in order to develop a feasible framework for web archiving of the Indigenous Knowledge and heritage materials in academic institutional repositories.
The practical implication of the paper is how it has dealt with the issues of ensuring long-term digital preservation of digital information to permanently secure and protect the integrity, authenticity and ensure future access to indigenous knowledge in academic institutional repositories in Africa.
11:20 – 11:40
Dunja Majstorović & Karolina Holub: Knowledge, habits and prospects of the use of web archives among the academic community in Croatia
Dunja Majstorović, Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb
Karolina Holub, National and University Library in Zagreb
The archiving of Web resources in Croatia has had a history of almost 15 years – it started in September of 2004 when Croatian Web Archive (HAW) was founded. Up until 2011 Web content was collected only selectively while later that year harvesting of the entire national .hr domain and the thematic harvesting began. HAW stores news media (national and local), websites of institutions, associations, clubs, research projects, portals, blogs, official websites of counties, cities, journals and books. The size of the entire Croatian Web Archive in September 2018 accounted over 40 TB while all content is publicly available and can be searched and browsed in several ways via its web site and through Library catalog.
In Croatia there has been no research into the use of HAW, and since the sheer volume of data that can be found in the Web archives is overwhelming, this comes as a surprise. Potential audience that could be interested in HAW is large and includes academic users (researchers and students) as well as public in general. Due to the lack of research, there is a need to further the discussion about Web archive visibility among at least one potential users – the academic community.
Therefore, the goal of this research is to question the academic community in Croatia in order to gain insight into their knowledge of available web archives (both Croatian and international) as well as their habits of web archive consumption. A survey will be conducted among university staff, researchers in research institutions and students within the identified academic fields (disciplines) that have potentially large interest in studying web archives and that could benefit from studying the material they offer. We chose to conduct a research among academic fields (disciplines) as following: history, journalism and mass media, sociology, political science, information science, computer science and linguistics. The survey will use open and close-ended questions to investigate participants knowledge of, habits of use and attitudes towards Web archives.
We hope this research will provide a valuable insight into a topic not yet researched in Croatia but also be a valuable contribution to studying Web archives user communities in general.
11:40 – 12:00
Joe Carrano: From the foundational web to founding a web archives: Creating a formalized Web Archiving Program at the MIT Libraries
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had, and continues to have, a high level of engagement and involvement in foundational work on the internet and support mechanisms of the World Wide Web. MIT students also took to the early web with gusto and started creating their own sites, even registering the www.mit.edu domain themselves. From that point thirty years ago, the mit.edu domain and websites produced at the Institute grew and sprawled in many different directions. Despite MIT’s early involvement and their creation of websites, MIT Libraries Institute Archives and Special Collections (IASC) started only recently capturing this content for long-term preservation and access. Where does one begin when there is such a vast amount of material to capture and much of which is included in other web archiving efforts?
This presentation will describe the MIT IASC web archiving strategies from pilot project in 2016-2017 to its building up in the past year and a half into a formalized program. It will discuss our initial selection, curation, and appraisal methods in determining where to start crawling and focus initial energies, including a focus on diversity, inclusion, and social justice values, outreach with web administrators in different departments to develop seed lists, and tools used to determine what has been crawled by others on the MIT domain. This presentation will also describe our approach in developing web archives collections of students and MIT affiliated content with the goal of doing it ethically and with the informed consent of content creators.
Additionally, this talk will go into how MIT IASC developed their web archiving metadata application profile based on archival standards and involvement with a group of emerging practice of describing web archives in the United States. This will include our method of integrating web archives description into archival collections and the ArchivesSpace collection management system. It will also discuss the initial roll out of user access in the reading room and Archive-It website and attempts to promote the collections on campus.
12:00 – 12-20
Bartłomiej Konopa: Studying the past Web in Poland – current state and perspectives
Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, State Archive in Bydgoszcz
The development of research on the past Web around the world, prompts to ask how does it look in Poland? Currently, there is no general national Web archive in this country, however, there have been and still are leaded projects which aim is to collect and preserve a fragment of that type of resources. Of course, the collections of the past polish Web are also gathered and stored by the Internet Archive foundation. Are researchers aware of their existence and do they see their use in science? Perhaps the research in which they were used have been already carried out? What was their character and subject matter, what sources were used and what methods were used with them? These are some of the main questions that could be asked considering the state of Polish studies related to the past Web.
The main purpose of the paper is to analyze the state of research on the past Web in Poland. First of all, it is necessary to identify the source database, which can be used in the research, so one should answer the question of how does archiving the Web in this country look like. Knowledge about researchers opinion on that type of materials, presented in scientific lectures, would also be useful. Then, the review of publications discussing research on the past Web would be needed as well, in order to identify their issues and how they are carried out. Moreover, getting acquainted with the attitude of Polish scientists to carrying them would be equally interesting. Thanks to getting to know the opinion of employees of the science about the past Web and the prospects of his research, it will be possible to consider the directions of its further development.
The paper will consist of two main parts. The first one will include a discussion on actions taken in Poland related to the preservation of the Web, as well as reflection on its archiving and the sources created during it. This will allow to know what is the foundation for conducting research on the archived Web, which will be discussed in the second part of the paper. Also, there will be presented the results of the survey, which the author will conduct in the representatives of various humanities and social sciences at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and their attitude to researching the past Web. It will contain questions about their knowledge and existence of such resources as well as their potential usage in science. In addition, a group of respondents, who previously were using the past Web, will be asked about the character of their works. Then, in this part, the polish researches of the past Web, which results have been presented in scientific publications, will be presented and analyzed. Their characteristics, used sources, attitude to them and methods used during the research will be examined in particular.